Discovering a Love for Industrial Controls 🎛️

A deep pride in knowing the machines that we've programmed make something that people buy and enjoy from basketballs, fine art, ice cream, airplanes, and everything in between.

Mar 03, 2024

Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

From the industrial floors to automation’s lair,
Thy presence is felt, ubiquitous and fair.
In the language of ones and zeros, thou speak,
Binding machines together, strong and sleek.

From “An Ode to Industrial Standards”

Kaizen Blitz

💸 Anzu Partners, Hitachi Ventures, Myriad Venture Partners, SkyRiver Ventures, and The Steele Group create ven^x, a collaboration space for the deep tech venture and startup ecosystem in Boston. AFWERX ends involvement in the Defense Ventures Program.
🏀 Rather than being inflated, the Airless Gen1 Basketball from Wilson relies on a 3D-printed polymer lattice structure to replicate the bounce, flight, and feel of a traditional basketball.
🎨🖌️🦾 Rosca Studio: Where fine arts meet robotics. Powered by Acrylic Robotics.
🔋 As a battery production facility ramps up, scrap rates can reach upwards of 90% with component bottlenecks hampering Mercedes’ EV ambitions.
🍎 Supply chain traceability is critical to recalls like this contaminated case of applesauce.
💾 "Fab for Free" is a new ordering service that helps new and existing Quilter users build free prototypes of their AI-designed circuit boards.

Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

🍦 The Scoop on Keeping an Ice Cream Factory Cool

✍️ Author: Edd Gent
🏭 Vertical: Food
🏢 Organizations: Unilever

Borkowski maintains and updates equipment at the innovation center’s pilot plant at Colworth Science Park in Sharnbrook, England. The company’s food scientists and engineers use this small-scale factory to experiment with new ice cream formulations and novel production methods. Much of Borkowski’s work involves improving the environmental impact of ice cream production by cutting waste and reducing the amount of energy needed to keep products frozen.

🦾 A year after its fundraising failure, Omnirobotic emerges from restructuring as a profitable robot builder

✍️ Author: Josh Scott
🏢 Organizations: Omnirobotic

This time last year, the end was approaching for Omnirobotic. Technology market conditions were deteriorating and the venture-backed startup had failed to secure Series A financing. Even after laying off a third of its staff, the Laval, QC-based company was still running dangerously low on cash.

In an interview with BetaKit, Omnirobotic co-founder and CEO Francois Simard said it took three months to accept that he was not going to be able to raise new funding to fuel the company’s recurring revenue platform strategy and half a year for Omnirobotic to secure the buy-in required to restructure and reinvent itself as a maker of autonomous industrial robots.

While this pivot from an artificial intelligence (AI) software firm into a less scalable but more sustainable machine builder seemed like the best path forward for Omnirobotic, Simard acknowledged that it was still a gamble with no guarantee of paying off.

✈️ Modern Aerospace Construction: The Manufacture of a Hightech Plane

🏢 Organizations: Airbus

💾 TsFile: A Standard Format for IoT Time Series Data

✍️ Author: Susan Hall
🔖 Topics: Data Architecture, IIoT, Open Source
🏢 Organizations: Tsinghua University

TsFile is a columnar storage file format designed for time series data, featuring advanced compression to minimize storage, high throughput of read and write, and deep integration with processing and analysis tools such as Apache projects Spark and Flink. TsFile is designed to support a “high ingestion rate up to tens of million data points per second and rare updates only for the correction of low-quality data; compact data packaging and deep compression for long-live historical data; traditional sequential and conditional query, complex exploratory query, signal processing, data mining and machine learning.”

TsFile is the underlying storage file format for the Apache IoTDB time-series database. IoTDB represents more than a decade of work at China’s Tsinghua University School of Software. It became a top-level project with the Apache Software Foundation in 2020.

💽 Inside Micron Taiwan’s Semiconductor Factory

🏢 Organizations: Micron

🚀 Automated Disassembly of Deadly Weapons

✍️ Author: James DeSmet
🏭 Vertical: Defense
🏢 Organizations: CRG Automation, US Army

In 2021, systems integrator CRG Automation successfully completed an unprecedented project to automate the process of disarming, disassembling and destroying 70,000 aging rockets filled with deadly nerve agents. The project was so successful that the Army came back to us with another task: Create an automated system to disassemble and destroy thousands of mortar rounds filled with highly toxic mustard agent. The rounds were stored at the Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant (PCAPP) in Pueblo, CO, and would have to be destroyed by the end of 2023.

The system was designed virtually using computational fluid dynamics, quickly proving that the concept would work. This was essential given the finished technology involved five subsystems and more than 2,000 parts.

🚙 The Fascinating Evolution of Automotive Wiring

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative products and services

🏭 First electric cars. Next, electric factories?

BASF has joined a consortium including SABIC, a Saudi chemicals firm, and Linde, a European engineering firm, to develop an electric furnace that can generate heat intense enough for the chemical reactions that are their bread and butter. These firms are not the only recent converts to the electrification of industry. On February 8th Rio Tinto and bhp, both gargantuan mining firms, announced a joint effort to build Australia’s first electric smelter for iron ore. Fortescue, another mining giant, is introducing all-electric excavators and mining lorries, while Spain’s Roca Group recently unveiled the first electric industrial tunnel kiln for ceramics. Such innovations offer a new path to slowing global warming which may in many cases prove quicker and easier than approaches based on ccs and hydrogen.

Some companies are betting that what works in the home can work in the factory, too. One such is AtmosZero, a startup that aims to reduce emissions at New Belgium Brewing, an American beermaker. AtmosZero is installing a heat pump that will soon replace one of the gas-fired boilers at New Belgium’s brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado. Like most industrial firms over the past 150 years, New Belgium burns fossil fuel to produce steam, which in its case then heats the ingredients required to make beer. AtmosZero’s heat pump will allow it to produce that steam without any burning. Since the electricity used to run the pump will be renewable in the future, that eliminates most greenhouse-gas emissions from the process. It is also more efficient, consuming less energy overall. And because the heat pump transfers warmth to water, just as in a conventional boiler, the equipment can be slotted into New Belgium’s existing factory, without the need for a complete overhaul.

🚰 Bechtel and Five Point Energy Announce Sustained Pilot Operations of Innovative Water Conservation Technology

🔖 Topics: Sustainability
🏢 Organizations: Bechtel, Five Point Energy

Bechtel announced the sustained pilot operations of its proprietary Low Energy Ejector Desalination System (LEEDS) – a long-awaited economic solution that creates a valuable new supply of water for customers and communities, which in turn reduces stress on limited freshwater resources.

LEEDS is an efficient, cost-effective, end-to-end solution that converts produced water from oil and gas fields into usable, end-marketable products. The recovered water can be used for agriculture or grassland irrigation, feedstocks for industrial uses such as hydrogen production, fertilizers for agricultural uses, and clean water for industrial and community applications. By transforming a costly byproduct into a useful resource, LEEDS allows customers to handle produced water responsibly while also alleviating water scarcity.

📏 Onto Innovation’s 4Di InSpec™ Automated Metrology System Receives 2024 Innovative System of the Year Award from FANUC America

🔖 Topics: Metrology, Nondestructive Test
🏢 Organizations: Onto Innovation

Onto Innovation Inc. and its Tucson subsidiary 4D Technology today announced they’ve been named winner of FANUC America’s prestigious 2024 Innovative System of the Year award for the 4Di InSpec automated metrology system (AMS). The system enables automated surface defect and feature metrology for aviation, aerospace and other applications in the industrial manufacturing market. The patented, vibration-immune technology enables the unique capability of using non-contact, three-dimensional optical metrology on the production floor, providing new levels of defect inspection with micrometer-level resolution. In partnership with OptiPro Systems, the 4Di InSpec AMS systems were delivered in the second half of 2023 to several leading aerospace engine manufacturers.

Industrial Policy

How governments are shaping the future industrial landscape.

🇩🇪 How Germany’s steelmakers plan to go green

✍️ Author: Patricia Nilsson
🏢 Organizations: Salzgitter, Thyssenkrupp, SMS Group

Global steel production today accounts for at least 7 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In Germany, it emits more than a quarter of the country’s total industrial carbon dioxide. Salzgitter has said that once its revamped steel plant is run entirely on green hydrogen, its annual CO2 emissions, which currently stand at 8mn tonnes, will drop by a staggering 95 per cent.

German authorities have pledged more than €6bn in subsidies to steelmakers in a bid to shore up Europe’s largest industrial base, which is already struggling with high energy prices and falling global demand for its cars and machinery. The full implementation of the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism, a tariff regime intended to give Europe’s basic industries protection from cheaper, dirtier imports while they decarbonise their own operations, has opened a window of opportunity for such heavy investment.

🇦🇺󠁡󠁵󠁮󠁳󠁷󠁿 $275 million investment sparks Net Zero manufacturing and jobs in NSW

The NSW Labor Government is announcing $275 million in grants under the Net Zero Manufacturing Initiative, to secure NSW as the place to develop and manufacture clean technology and create new jobs in the process.

The Net Zero Manufacturing Initiative will offer the following grants:

Renewable Manufacturing – increasing capacity to make the components for renewable energy projects, which will alleviate supply chain constraints and increase local content capability.
Clean Technology Innovation – helping businesses get scalable low-emission technologies, market-ready.
Low Carbon Product Manufacturing – establishing industrial facilities and manufacturing capabilities that can take advantage of investment in new and emerging low carbon industries.

🇧🇪 How to Fulfill the Belgian Federal Learning Account Requirements With Azumuta

✍️ Author: Ariq Dmitri
🏢 Organizations: Azumuta

From April 1, 2024 at the latest, private sector employers in Belgium with at least 20 full-time employees (FTE) are legally required to provide at least 5 training days/year for each employee. Meanwhile, employers with 10-19 FTEs must allocate at least 1 training day/year. Azumuta’s Skill Matrix & Training is a suitable employee training tool for fulfilling your organization’s FLA requirements.

Business Transactions

This week's top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains

Amazon to invest in start-ups that combine AI with robotics

✍️ Author: Camilla Hodgson
🏢 Organizations: Amazon

Amazon’s $1bn industrial innovation fund is to step up investments in companies that combine artificial intelligence and robotics, as the ecommerce giant seeks to drive efficiencies across its logistics network. The industrial innovation fund is seeking to invest in start-ups that can support the ecommerce group’s aims of becoming “more efficient, safer for our associates, and increase the speed of delivery to our customers”, Bossart said.

Amazon has innovated in robotics before: in 2022, the company said it had invested more than €400mn in technologies that include industrial robotics and sorting systems in its European warehouses. It has deployed 750,000 mobile robots across its operations network.

🇺🇸 Figure Raises $675M for Its Humanoid Robot Development

✍️ Author: Evan Ackerman
🔖 Topics: Funding Event
🏢 Organizations: Figure, Microsoft, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Intel

Figure is announcing an astonishing US $675 million Series B raise, which values the company at an even more astonishing $2.6 billion. Figure is one of the companies working toward a multipurpose or general-purpose (depending on whom you ask) bipedal or humanoid (depending on whom you ask) robot. The astonishing thing about this valuation is that Figure’s robot is still very much in the development phase—although they’re making rapid progress, which they demonstrate in a new video posted this week.

This round of funding comes from Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest. Figure says that they’re going to use this new capital “for scaling up AI training, robot manufacturing, expanding engineering head count, and advancing commercial deployment efforts.” In addition, Figure and OpenAI will be collaborating on the development of “next-generation AI models for humanoid robots” which will “help accelerate Figure’s commercial timeline by enhancing the capabilities of humanoid robots to process and reason from language.

Read more at IEEE Spectrum and Brett Adcock

🇩🇪 RobCo raises €39.1M from Lightspeed, Sequoia, others

🏢 Organizations: RobCo, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Technical University of Munich

RobCo, a provider of affordable and connected robotics automation solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), has secured $42.5M (approximately €39.17M) in a Series B round of funding. The investment came from global VC firm Lightspeed Venture Partners along with existing investor Sequoia Capital. Kindred Capital and Promus Ventures also participated in this round.

RobCo facilitates SMEs’ entry into automation and addresses challenges such as skilled labour shortages, production scalability, and the transition to Industry 4.0. The company’s platform allows remote configuration, implementation, and management of robots via a digital twin, using a low-code approach that eliminates the need for complex programming or specialised personnel.

Read more at Silicon Canals and Lightspeed

🇨🇦 Elevated Signals Raises $7.9 Million in Series A Funding

🏢 Organizations: Elevated Signals, Yaletown Partners

Elevated Signals Inc., a company pioneering modern manufacturing software, is pleased to announce that it has secured CAD$7.9 million in Series A funding. The investment was led by Yaletown Partners, with participation from Third Kind Venture Capital, WGD Capital, Colin Harris, Raiven Capital, and Pareto Holdings.

Elevated Signals’ cloud-based platform automates and simplifies the capture of real-time manufacturing data, providing a unified source of truth that is accessible company-wide. This data also lays the foundation for companies to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) for continued process optimization.

🇩🇪 Assemblio raises €2.1 million to create the future of assembly planning

🏢 Organizations: Assemblio, LEA Partners

Assemblio, a software company that helps to intelligently plan assembly and generate fully automatic assistance systems for production, has completed a €2.1 million seed funding round. The lead investor is LEA Partners, joined by Mätch VC, Cross Atlantic Angels, Silver Scale, and Integra, as well as other business angels. The Assemblio team plans to use the fresh capital to expand further and drive forward product development. The big goal is to make assembly processes easier, faster, and more cost-efficient.

Assemblio offers an AI-based software solution for time- and cost-efficient assembly planning. Its Assembly Information Models reduce the planning effort from weeks and months to a matter of minutes, actively contributing to cost reduction. This has already convinced various large industrial customers such as Krones and Bosch.

🇬🇧 Sonichem secures €1.4 million to convert sawdust into high-value bio-based chemicals

🏢 Organizations: Sonichem, ACF Investors

Sonichem, an East Midlands-based startup that converts low-value forestry by-products into high-value, renewable biochemicals, has secured €1.4 million in Pre-Series A funding including a follow-on investment by ACF Investors. The investment will be used to further develop its technology and finalise plans for a biorefinery plant — the first of its kind.

Only 55% of logs that enter a sawmill become usable construction timber. The other 45% end up as low-value by-products such as woodchips and sawdust. Sonichem breaks down this feedstock through its novel patent process — combining chemistry and ultrasound technology — into three main constituent natural bio-based chemicals: sugars, cellulose and lignin. For every £1 of sawdust, Sonichem’s technology can create £8 worth of bio-based sustainable chemicals.

Capgemini to acquire Unity’s Digital Twin Professional Services arm to accelerate enterprises’ digital transformation through real-time 3D technology

🔖 Topics: Partnership
🏢 Organizations: Capgemini, Unity

Capgemini and Unity (NYSE: U), the world’s leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D (RT3D) content, announced an expansion of their strategic alliance that will see Capgemini take on Unity’s Digital Twin Professional Services arm. Per the agreement, Unity’s Digital Twin Professional Services team will join and embed within Capgemini, forming one of the largest pools of Unity enterprise developers in the world. The transaction will accelerate the iteration and implementation of the market leading real-time 3D (RT3D) visualization software for the industrial application of digital twins. It will allow end users to envision, understand, and interact with physical systems – a key enabler for intelligent industry. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2024.

Read more at Capgemini Press Releases

NTT DATA and Schneider Electric Join Forces to Drive AI Innovation at the Edge

🏢 Organizations: NTT DATA, Schneider Electric

The joint offering combines NTT DATA’s Edge as a Service, which includes fully managed Edge to Cloud, Private 5G, and IoT capabilities, with Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure, a modular data center that fuses OT solutions with the latest in IT technologies. This powerful combination enables companies to maximize energy efficiency and meet the demands of compute-intensive tasks such as machine vision, predictive maintenance, and other AI inferencing applications at the edge.

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