Unwrap the Potential of Smart Manufacturing

This week: Automated vibration compensation, control panel design, 3D printer and robot adoption, cave propagation in 4D, new AI physics simulation displaying reasoning, and largest private VC raise.

Dec 22, 2024

Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

At $249, the new version of NVIDIA’s Jetson computer is the perfect gift for hobbyists and developers of robots and industrial automation to run sophisticated AI computations directly without connecting to a remote data center. Another option is the Qualcomm RB3 Gen 2 developer kits, designed to put advanced AI edge computing power into the hands of developers everywhere at $399. It’s never too early or late to invest in automation. Happy Holidays!

Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

📳 Vibration Compensation Improves Robot Performance

✍️ Author: Julia Hider

Any machine that moves deals with vibration, whether it’s a 3D printer, machine tool or robot. It’s typically managed to the point that many do not even realize that vibration is a problem, but with proper strategies to deal with vibration, machines can run faster and more efficiently. Ulendo is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based startup that produces software solutions for managing vibration in manufacturing automation.

Ulendo’s solution actually compensates for a machine’s vibrations instead of working around them. It does this by “tricking the machine,” as Okwudire describes it. Traditionally, Ulendo measures the machine’s vibration patterns and creates a “calibration map” that predicts how the machine will vibrate and calculates how to offset that motion. So, if a machine veers to the left instead of going straight, Ulendo VC-R (vibration compensation for robots) adjusts the path to the right, which cancels out the leftward motion and causes the machine to go straight.

Automating Control Panel Design and Fabrication Featuring Rittal’s Brian Jung and EPLAN’s Kruno Kutnohorski

🖨️ Edmontonian developing 3D printer that could be 'manufacturing plant of the moon'

✍️ Author: Cameron MacCuish
🏢 Organizations: Space Copy

Madison Feehan, CEO and founder of Space Copy, said she realized that 3D printing could substantially reduce the significant cost and logistic hurdles of sending astronauts back to the moon during her five years as a contract worker for NASA.

Space Copy is developing what we call in situ logistics and additive manufacturing technology. Now, that is a bunch of fancy words for 3D printing, and essentially, it is a materials processing and 3D printing device all in one. Consider it the manufacturing plant of the moon. Essentially, what we’re doing is we’re taking materials like lunar soil and we are breaking it down into a fine powder. Then, we are using that powder to 3D print different kinds of infrastructure, ranging from astronaut habitats to repair parts and tools to repair rovers and anything that you could think of when it comes to in-space manufacturing long term.

🦾 ROKAE XB7L Robots Streamline Apple Packaging with 1.9-Second Cycle Time

Robots guided by Micropsi Industries' AI-vision software, MIRAI, can do tasks that are just not viable with other systems
Mech-GPT: Empowering Robots with an Embodied Intelligent Brain

🇨🇳 Chinese Robots Hit the Factory Floor

✍️ Author: Rachel Cheung

China’s factories have been at the heart of the country’s economic rise, helping the country come to account for nearly a third of global manufacturing and providing millions of jobs in the process. Increasingly, though, robots are taking over. By the end of last year, Chinese manufacturers had deployed 470 robot units per 10,000 workers, some three times the global average.

📊 Unsupervised multimodal fusion of in-process sensor data for advanced manufacturing process monitoring

✍️ Authors: Matthew McKinney, Anthony Garland, Dale Cillessen
🏢 Organizations: Sandia National Laboratories

Effective monitoring of manufacturing processes is crucial for maintaining product quality and operational efficiency. Our proposed method demonstrates the ability to handle and learn encoders for five distinct modalities: visual imagery, audio signals, laser position (x and y coordinates), and laser power measurements. By compressing these high-dimensional datasets into low-dimensional representational spaces, our approach facilitates downstream tasks such as process control, anomaly detection, and quality assurance. The unsupervised nature of our method makes it broadly applicable across various manufacturing domains, where large volumes of unlabeled sensor data are common. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach through a series of experiments, demonstrating its potential to enhance process monitoring capabilities in advanced manufacturing systems.

Read more at Journal of Manufacturing Systems

New Product Introduction

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

⛏️ Ideon Activates REVEAL™ for Caving Solution at Australia’s First Block Cave Mining Operation

🏢 Organizations: Ideon Technologies, Evolution Mining

Canadian subsurface intelligence leader Ideon Technologies has activated its supernova-powered solution for subsurface cave imaging at Evolution Mining Northparkes Operations in New South Wales, Australia. This is the world’s first commercial in-mine muon tomography system deployment, taking place just three months after the release of the REVEAL™ for Caving solution and successful field trial results.

The Ideon REVEAL™ for Caving solution allows mining companies to remotely monitor progression of cave propagation in 4D, significantly reducing geological uncertainty in understanding the rock volume and how it is evolving in and around the cave over time. It delivers a high-resolution, high-volume, high-velocity Earth model that delineates the location of the cave relative to both the background geology and the target ore body. In turn, this understanding gives mine operators the ability to mitigate emerging geotechnical risk, achieve greater production predictability, and proactively manage cave growth.

🧠⚖️ New physics sim trains robots 430,000 times faster than reality

A large group of university and private industry researchers unveiled Genesis, a new open source computer simulation system that lets robots practice tasks in simulated reality 430,000 times faster than in the real world. Researchers can also use an AI agent to generate 3D physics simulations from text prompts.

The accelerated simulation means a neural network for piloting robots can spend the virtual equivalent of decades learning to pick up objects, walk, or manipulate tools during just hours of real computer time.

The Genesis platform, developed by a group led by Zhou Xian of Carnegie Mellon University, processes physics calculations up to 80 times faster than existing robot simulators (like Nvidia’s Isaac Gym). It uses graphics cards similar to those that power video games to run up to 100,000 copies of a simulation at once. That’s important when it comes to training the neural networks that will control future real-world robots.

🆕🏭 Tesla begins operation at its South Texas lithium refinery, firing up its kiln for first time

🏢 Organizations: Tesla

Tesla Inc. has begun operations at its new lithium refinery near Corpus Christi, a plant CEO Elon Musk said eventually would produce enough of the material for batteries in 1 million electric vehicles per year — and could expand beyond that. Tesla North America said raw materials were successfully fed through the plant’s kiln for the first time last week.

At the May 2023 groundbreaking, Musk said the $375 million plant, the first large-scale refinery for battery grade lithium in the U.S., would begin production in 2025.

Read more at San Antonio Express-News

Other new facilities:

Archer’s Air Taxi Assembly Plant [Assembly]
QCell’s $1.5B DOE loan at world record 28.6% efficiency [Mfg Dive & pv-tech]
TSMC Details Its High-End “2nm Process” with 15% higher performance, with up to 30 percent less power consumption, and a 1.15-times rise in transistor density. [wccftech]

New canvas additions include AutoStoe, Cofactr, Copia Automation, DeepMind, DHL, Eureka Robotics, Helmerich & Payne, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LMI Technologies, NextEra Energy, Optilogic, Orbital Composites, Sandia National Laboratories, and Toray Industries.

Business Transactions

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

🇺🇸 Databricks is Raising $10B Series J Investment at $62B Valuation

🔖 Topics: Funding Event

Databricks, the Data and AI company, announced its Series J funding. The company is raising $10 billion of expected non-dilutive financing and has completed $8.6 billion to date. This funding values Databricks at $62 billion and is led by Thrive Capital.

The company has seen increased momentum and accelerated growth (over 60% year-over-year) in recent quarters largely due to the unprecedented interest in artificial intelligence. To satisfy customer demand, Databricks intends to invest this capital towards new AI products, acquisitions, and significant expansion of its international go-to-market operations. In addition to fueling its growth, this capital is expected to be used towards providing liquidity for current and former employees, as well as pay related taxes. Finally, this quarter marks the first time the company is expected to achieve positive free cash flow.

🇮🇳 Haber Raises $44M to Scale Smart Manufacturing Solutions in North America

Haber, a leading smart manufacturing startup, has successfully raised $44 million in its Series C funding round, which included $38 million in equity and $6 million in debt. The funding round was led by Creaegis, BEENEXT, and Accel, demonstrating strong investor confidence in the company’s innovative AI-driven solutions and its vision for global expansion. Haber’s AI-powered automation solutions are designed to optimize manufacturing processes, enhance efficiency, and minimize environmental impact, transforming industries from the inside out.

🇺🇸 Slip Robotics Raises $28M Series B Financing Led by DCVC

Slip Robotics, a next-generation provider of automated truck-loading robots-as-a-service, has raised a $28 million Series B financing led by DCVC, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm specializing in deep tech. The investment reflects Slip’s rapid growth with industry-leading customers – including John Deere, GE Appliances, Valeo, and Nissan – who are using SlipBots to load and unload any truck in just 5 minutes.

Valeo, a multinational automotive parts manufacturer, used SlipBots to reduce their trailer load/unload times from 30 minutes to just 5 minutes. SlipBots seamlessly integrated into their operations, enabling employees to increase dock throughput by 6x, reduce forklift traffic by 8x, and increase safety at the loading dock.

🇺🇸 T-robotics Secures $5.4M Seed Funding and Applies AI to How Industrial Robots Understand, Learn, and Adapt to Complex Manufacturing Environments

T-robotics, a developer of programming for any robot using natural language and skill models with no code required, announced it has raised a $5.4 million Seed round, co-led by Emergent Ventures and Engine Ventures with Berkeley Skydeck and Raisewell participating. T-robotics will use the fresh capital to expand its U.S. and E.U. operations. Additionally, the company was selected as one of just two winners, from among a group of more than 100 global applicants, in the ABB AI Startup Challenge.

T-robotics’s software, ActGPT, is robot-agnostic and integrates with a variety of commercial robotic solutions, such as robotic arms or mobile robots, and leverages multi-modal data streams from vision, haptics, and language inputs to empower robots with enhanced problem-solving capabilities.

🇺🇸 Apptronik Partners with Google DeepMind Robotics to Accelerate Advancement on AI-powered Humanoid Robots

🔖 Topics: Partnership

Apptronik, the AI-powered humanoid robotics company, announced it had entered a strategic partnership agreement with the Google DeepMind robotics team. The partnership will bring together best-in-class artificial intelligence with cutting-edge hardware and embodied intelligence, advancing humanoid robots that can be more helpful to people in dynamic environments. From pioneering advancements in foundation models to leveraging state-of-the-art AI models like Gemini, Google DeepMind’s robotics team is developing advanced AI systems that can support robotics applications, enabling reasoning and action in the real world.

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