Shop Talk
Capturing this week’s zeitgeist
Got mogged by an outstanding 3D printed factory layout at IMTS. I need to level up
/Jim Belosic on X/
…
”Pro tip: 3D print your equipment and use it to plan new facility layouts. So much better than a CAD floor plan”
Below are a few of my favorite trade show and museum displays over the years.
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Assembly Line
This week’s industrial breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.
🇨🇳🛬⚙️ Chinese aviation brake tech ends foreign monopoly, cuts costs and powers new energy vehicles
✍️ Authors: Fan Wei, Liang Rui
Aviation braking is essentially energy management. During landing, brake discs must withstand temperatures above 1,000 C while staying stable under high friction, impact, and frequent takeoffs and landings. The key to energy conversion is materials.
The confidence comes from new carbon-ceramic materials made from carbon fiber and a ceramic matrix. They can withstand temperatures over 1,000 C while keeping stable despite friction during heavy, repeated braking. They also weigh a quarter of traditional materials, cutting brake system weight by 30 to 40 percent. Also important is the fact that they also last longer and perform more reliably in extreme conditions.
Carbon-ceramic brake discs are now used on more than 10 types of advanced Chinese aircraft, making China the first country to use them on aircraft on a mass scale, Zhou said.
Read more at Global Times
🇨🇳🔋 An American startup ditched Kentucky for China. Here’s why /Reuters on YouTube/
🇨🇳🔋 Western companies lag China in sodium battery race /FT/
🇨🇳💰 Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures Visit China as Country’s AI Prowess Rises /The Information/
How iFlight FPV Drones Are Made | Inside the Full Production Process
From raw materials to the sky, step inside iFlight and see how FPV drones are made. Explore the precision manufacturing, detailed assembly, to quality control and final testing.
Can the US build a DJI? /Arena Physica/ How DJI achieves its exceptional margins, from a teardown of two popular drones.
Oxford spin-off, Alloyed, builds low-cost jet engines for drones /FT/
🤏🦾🧠 Empirical results fine-tuning π0.5 on a real manufacturing task
Dream Machines tested the open-source vision-language-action model from Physical Intelligence /GitHub/ on an industrial manufacturing assembly task. Workers collected teleoperation data across multiple desks using Gello controllers and virtual reality headsets. Full model fine-tuning produced much higher physical success rates than low-rank adaptation methods. The engineers discovered that data quality and visual diversity improved reliability faster than simply recording dozens of repetitive demonstration hours.
The team achieved rapid performance gains by introducing human corrections into the training pipeline. 240 recovery rollouts boosted success from 24%to 88% with less than two hours of total training data. Real Time Chunking inference settings from Physical Intelligence pushed final insertion success to ninety-eight percent during physical evaluations. Companies developing robotic automation can reduce machine training expenses by focusing investments on edge-case interventions and execution blending parameters.
Read more at Dream Machines
Faster Robot Inference at the Edge with InstinctFlash /General Instinct/. One inference runtime for eight robot models, with up to 33.78× faster inference on Jetson Thor.
RL Finetuning of Generalist Robot Policies Under Inference Latency /arXiv/. In this work, we introduce a latency-aware framework, Asynchronous RL with Intermediate Information (ARLI), that enables RL-based improvement of generalist policies under inference delays.
Introducing Intrinsic Core™ : An open source approach to Physical AI /Intrinsic/ providing an open, local runtime, SDK, and hardware agnostic, real-time control framework for industrial robotics /GitHub/.
Hidden Factory
Unseen patterns in emerging industrial technology
This week focuses on Machine Vision.
New Product Introduction
Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services
🚀🛰️ Google Takes the A.I. Data Center Race to Outer Space
Google started Project Suncatcher because terrestrial facilities face power and land constraints. Google executives Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin approved orbital research to capture continuous solar power directly in orbit. The company validated hardware survival by blasting specialized chips with particle beams at Crocker Nuclear Laboratory. Google then contracted Planet Labs to supply a modified commercial satellite bus equipped with these processors. SpaceX provides the launch services by loading the hardware onto a Falcon 9 rocket at Vandenberg Space Force Base.
The payload contains four tensor processing units to calculate short responses for the Gemini system. Conductive sheets of aluminum and copper move heat away from the processors because standard fans stop functioning without air. This cooling hardware transfers heat into a radiator panel before the system shuts down for recovery. Planet Labs engineers modified existing inventory so the team could accelerate flight schedules ahead of larger orbital tests. Google expects satellite network costs to match ground installation costs during the next decade.
Read more at NYT
Bambu Lab Launches R1, A 55W CO₂ Laser Cutter & Engraver
Bambu Lab announced the launch of the R1, a 55W CO2 laser cutter and engraver designed for the kind of work that used to require a dedicated workshop: cutting and engraving wood, clear acrylic and leather, engraves glass, stone and coated metals, aligns its own optical path automatically, in a machine safe to run at home. The R1 opens a new category within the Bambu ecosystem and marks a big step toward personal manufacturing, making more room for makers to create, and more materials in their hands. With the R1, a maker can take a design from a sheet of black walnut plywood or acrylic to a finished piece, in one machine, on their own bench.
Read more at PR Newswire
He Left SpaceX to Rebuild the American Factory /YouTube/, but do you want to know who else left SpaceX to build the next great industrial firm...
Introducing Exponential Industry Scholar
Exponential Industry, the premier source and mixed-media aggregator for the business culture of high-tech manufacturing, energy, and supply chains, is announcing the launch of Scholar, an intelligent career discovery engine and talent graph built specifically for the deep industrial economy.
Business Transactions
This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.
💰 SK hynix Launches ‘SK hynix Ventures’ in Silicon Valley to Expand Global AI Ecosystem Investment /SK hynix/ with the company planning to broaden its investment scope from traditional semiconductors and emerging tech to the broader AI ecosystem.
💰 $5.75 billion to back the founders building what’s next /BVP/. While investments in deep tech and hardware like Rocket Lab taught us how to underwrite companies where hardware, capital intensity and regulatory timelines all have to be solved at once – it’s the profile of defense tech and physical AI and why we had the conviction to back Waymo, Saronic and others.
🇺🇸🚀 Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Is Fueled With $30 Billion of His Fortune
Blue Origin has raised $10 billion in its first financing round involving outside investors, valuing Jeff Bezos’s space company at about $140 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. Bezos is contributing another $2 billion, bringing his investment since founding the company in 2000 to roughly $30 billion.
A central test is New Glenn, Blue Origin’s reusable orbital rocket. The company has completed three missions, but a vehicle was lost during a May hot-fire test, which damaged its Florida launch site. Blue Origin says it is rebuilding the site and aims to return New Glenn to flight by the end of 2026.
Read more at WSJ
🇺🇸🪙 Solcoa Announces $75M to Scale America’s First New Metalmaking Process in 80 Years
Solcoa Industries announced $75 million in financing to build Solcoa One, its first commercial rare earth metalmaking plant. The round includes $45 million in equity led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Gigascale Capital, Long Journey, Felicis, Dylan Field, and prominent leaders across defense and technology. It also includes $30 million in debt and equipment financing, anchored by J.P. Morgan. The financing will fund construction and commissioning of Solcoa One, expanded reactor manufacturing in Alameda, and growth of the company’s engineering and research teams.
The company develops halide-free chemistries, engineers the processes, and builds and operates its own modular reactors. Compared with legacy molten-salt electrolysis, Solcoa’s process is faster, uses less energy, costs less, and is cleaner. Solcoa’s process produces zero harmful emissions, including the extremely toxic fluoride gases and perfluorocarbons (potent greenhouse gases) associated with the legacy process. Each reactor takes weeks to build in Alameda, with capacity added in steady increments rather than waiting years for a conventional plant.
Read more at Business Wire
🇺🇸🪙 How Maglut is Taking On China’s Rare Earth Monopoly /S3 on YouTube/. S³ went inside their Long Beach lab to see how close the company they built together actually is to replacing the process China’s used for decades to dominate rare earth refining.
🇺🇸🧊 Mojave Raises $19 Million to Accelerate Shift to Humidity-First Climate Systems
Mojave Energy Systems announced $19 million in Series B funding to scale production of its ArctiDry platform, as commercial buildings in grocery, industrial, healthcare, hospitality, education, and other sectors move humidity control from an incidental byproduct of cooling to a deliberate priority. The round was led by new investor Fairtree Elevant Ventures, with a significant investment from new investor River Bay Investments. Returning investors At One Ventures, Fifth Wall, Myriad Venture Partners, and Starshot Capital also participated, along with new investors Cleo Capital and MetaTrail. Mojave will use the funding to grow its sales organization, expand manufacturing capacity, and continue development of new products on the ArctiDry platform.
Read more at GlobeNewswire
🇺🇸⚡ American Supercritical Launches to Make the Simple Cycle Gas Turbine Obsolete
American Supercritical emerged from stealth with $8 million in pre-seed funding to commercialize supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) power blocks as factory-built equipment. Silent Ventures led the round, joined by Riot Ventures, Harpoon, Reveille VC, Hillwood, Mana Ventures, Climate Capital, Alumni Ventures and other angel investors.
Installed at the exhaust, the sCO2 system provides up to 50% more power with no additional fuel, no turbine modification and no re-permitting, at one-tenth the size of a steam system. Converting the US fleet would avoid about 20 million tons of CO2 a year, 10% of the natural gas sector’s emissions, while providing gigawatts of additional power that is critically needed in today’s market.
Read more at Business Wire