Manufacturing's Six Seven: 6S and the Seven Wastes

This week: making infinitely long objects, capturing CO2 from moving vehicles, AI spot welding inspection, open AI-native robotics, parachute full of holes, AI nuclear control, OpenVCAD multi-material

Oct 19, 2025

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Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

While your middle schooler yells “six seven!” to get a laugh, you use 6S to make improvements to work areas and the 7 Wastes to identify ‘muda’. They are two parallel worlds using the same numbers for entirely opposite ends: one for social chaos, the other for industrial order. It’s a perfect snapshot of the world we live in: one side inundated with viral, ambiguous noise, and the other desperately trying to build, measure, and improve with ruthless precision.

If Exponential Industry has helped you sift through the noise of industrial technology please support the publication with a paid subscription:

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📅 Next up: The American Food Manufacturing Summit (FMS), November 4-5, Chicago, IL, USA, sets the standard for an executive-level food manufacturing conference, bringing together senior leaders from leading F&B brands and food and beverage manufacturing companies.

Assembly Line

This week’s Industry 5.0 breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.

How to build a $16B car company with RJ Scaringe, founder of Rivian

RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of Rivian, sits down for a cheeky pint with John Collison to discuss what it takes to build a car company from scratch, developing the first electric pickup truck, the shift to a software-defined zonal architecture, Rivian’s AI-driven approach to autonomy, and the strategy behind their recent $5.8 billion deal with Volkswagen.

The Machine That Scared All Of Silicon Valley

Some ambitious brainiacs in Knoxville have built an incredible machine. The start-up Perseus Materials can create infinitely long objects – think parts of bridges and wind turbine blades – via a new manufacturing process that cures and shapes composites on the fly. We show you the machine in action exclusively for the first time.

Remora is Trying To Delete 29% Of All CO2 Emissions

Paul Gross and his team at Remora in Wixom, MI are trying to do something that’s never been done before. They’re building mobile carbon capture devices for commercial trucks and trains. It’s a system that captures CO2 from moving vehicles before those emissions ever enter the atmosphere. Then they turn those captured emissions into revenue by selling to customers that can turn the liquified CO2 into new products.

How Meta Is Leveraging AI To Improve the Quality of Scope 3 Emission Estimates for IT Hardware /Meta Engineering/

AI and spot welding inspection: Reinventing Quality Control

In this episode, I dive into the fascinating world of non-destructive material testing with Christian Wagner from Vogt Ultrasonics and Jan Kutnik from Evoptima. Together, we explore how AI is revolutionizing spot weld inspection in the automotive industry, making quality control smarter and more precise than ever before.

Find links to the topics discussed at The Industrial AI Podcast

Path Robotics’ CEO on Welding World Model /Spotify/ and why world models are the next big thing in AI /The Verge/
MSDF-TL: A transfer learning and physics-constrained multi-source data fusion framework for weld state prediction /Journal of Manufacturing Processes/
America’s Manufacturing Resurgence Will Be Powered by Cobots /WSJ/

High Performance Motor Control From the Ground Up

How Tesla Keeps Its Motors Cool /YouTube/

Combining Sampling and Learning for Dynamic Whole-Body Manipulation

Researchers at the RAI Institute are exploring a variety of approaches to giving robots the ability to manipulate objects with higher levels of dexterity than is typically seen in robots – behavior that is more like a person or animal. Rather than limiting manipulation to static grasping of stationary objects with tweezer-like manipulators, we are interested in giving robots the ability to have dynamic interactions with objects that have mass, inertia, and kinetic energy of their own, and to allow a wide variety of contact patterns and contact conditions, such as pushing, rolling, tapping, etc. With that long-term goal in mind, one of the project teams has been exploring dynamic whole-body manipulation using a combination of reinforcement learning and sampling-based control. This approach enables a robot to perform dynamic and forceful interactions that require coordinated use of its arm, legs, and body where locomotion and manipulation are tightly intertwined.

Read more at Robotics and AI Institute and discuss on X

Tutorial on Robot Learning using LeRobot, the end-to-end robot learning library developed by Hugging Face /arXiv and GitHub/
An Open Source Dev Kit for AI-native Robotics /GitHub/ by The Robot Learning Company
OpenArm is an open-source 7DOF humanoid arm designed for physical AI research and deployment in contact-rich environments. With high backdrivability and compliance, it excels at safe human-robot interaction while delivering practical payload capabilities for real-world applications. /GitHub/
Humanoid robots: Crossing the chasm from concept to commercial reality /McKinsey/

Thomas Smith

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New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

This parachute is full of holes and that’s a good thing

This is a new type of parachute designed using the principles of kirigami – the art of transforming paper into 3D designs with cuts and folds. It starts as a flat disc, then deploys into a spring-like 3D cone as air flows through it. Instead of being buffeted by the wind, multiple slits allow the kirigami parachute to fall more accurately than conventional designs. The team behind it think that the simplicity of its construction will allow it to be cheaply mass produced, while its accuracy could make it especially useful distributing humanitarian aid.

Read more at Nature and New Atlas

Package Delivery by Drone (Part 135) /FAA/ and how it works /YouTube/
Drone Delivery is Taking Off /Asianometry on YouTube/
Airbound Secures $8.65M Seed Funding and Contract With Narayana Health to Enable One-Cent Drone Deliveries /Business Wire/ led by Lachy Groom, co-founder of Physical Intelligence

Bringing AI to the next generation of fusion energy

Operating a tokamak involves countless choices in how to tune the various “knobs” available, like magnetic coil currents, fuel injection and heating power. Manually finding a tokamak’s optimal settings to produce the most energy, while staying within operating limits, could be very inefficient.

Using TORAX in combination with reinforcement learning or evolutionary search approaches like AlphaEvolve, our AI agents can explore vast numbers of potential operating scenarios in simulation, rapidly identifying the most efficient and robust paths to generating net energy. This can help CFS focus on the most promising strategies, increasing the probability of success from day one, even before SPARC is fully commissioned and operating at full power.

We’ve been building the infrastructure to investigate various SPARC scenarios. We can look at maximizing fusion power produced under different constraints, or optimizing for robustness as we learn more about the machine.

Business Transactions

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

JPMorganChase Launches $1.5 Trillion Security and Resiliency Initiative to Boost Critical Industries /JPMorganChase/ across 4 themes and 27 sub-areas /PDF/

Dexory Secures $165M in Funding, Accelerating Global Expansion and AI-Powered Capabilities

Dexory, the leading provider of real-time warehouse intelligence, visibility and autonomous solutions, announced it has raised $165 million. This milestone reflects the value customers derive from the solution, resulting in strong growth since the company’s Series B in 2024. Eurazeo, through its Growth team, led the $100M Series C round, with participation from LTS Growth and Endeavor Catalyst, alongside existing investors DTCP, Atomico, Lakestar, Elaia, Latitude Ventures, Wave-X and others. In addition, Bootstrap Europe expanded the existing growth debt facility.

Since its Series B, Dexory has expanded the reach of its AI-enabled data-intelligence platform, DexoryView, across Europe, North America, and APAC, and established its North American headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee. This global footprint enables the company’s autonomous robots to capture and deliver the largest pool of live warehouse data and insights, driving significant improvements in efficiency, visibility, and scalability for its customers. Today, the platform is used by logistics leaders such as GXO, Maersk and DHL; manufacturers including Stellantis and GE Appliances; and by customers across pharmaceuticals, retail and eCommerce.

Caracol Raises $40M Series B to Accelerate Global Scale-Up of Advanced Manufacturing technologies

Caracol, one of Europe’s fastest-growing deep-tech companies and a pioneer in large-format robotic manufacturing, announced the closing of its $40 million Series B round, co-led by Omnes Capital, Move Capital Fund I, alongside CDP Venture Capital – Large Ventures Fund, which played a key role as a catalyst for international investors.

This new funding will further accelerate Caracol’s global scaling and international expansion. The company will cement its leadership in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East while expanding further into high-growth markets such as Asia Pacific, building on the strong traction it has already achieved in Japan. On the technology side, Caracol will deepen the capabilities of its multi-process, multi-material platforms, with a focus on software, automation, and artificial intelligence to deliver data-driven process control and unmatched quality. The company will also intensify the ramp-up of its metal additive manufacturing technologies, particularly in highly regulated sectors such as aerospace and defense, energy, and maritime, while continuing to expand its polymer offering in key verticals such as transportation, construction, and architecture.

Launchpad closes Series A to power its AI reimagining of the manufacturing sector

Launchpad, the AI-first robotics company powering real-world assembly automation, announced that it had successfully concluded a Series A funding round raising a total of USD $11 million. The funds will be used to accelerate the development of Launchpad’s innovative technology whilst meeting demand from existing and new customers in the US, UK and Europe. The round was co-led by Lavrock Ventures and Squadra Ventures, with participation from strategic and financial investors including Ericsson Ventures, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Cox Exponential and the Scottish National Investment Bank. This is in addition to the USD 2.5 million in grant funding awarded to Launchpad by Scottish Enterprise.