For those curious what all the hype is about: Nvidias new open source CAD Kernel enables AI to design iPhone like curvatures!
You can try it out in https://t.co/Qj76T65Cyt today!
For those curious what all the hype is about: Nvidias new open source CAD Kernel enables AI to design iPhone like curvatures!
You can try it out in https://t.co/Qj76T65Cyt today!
America will never be great at defense manufacturing if we aren't great at commercial manufacturing.
The best stress test of manufacturing and supply chain is capitalism. Adam Smith's invisible hand is the always-on stress test.
America has a manufacturing problem. Correct diagnosis.
Prototyping is the solution? Wrong. That was never the hard part.
Mass production and capacity? Sounds smarter, but high-volume manufacturing is a solved playbook once demand justifies the investment.
The real problem everyone keeps dancing around is the missing middle: making hundreds to thousands of complex parts fast, affordably, and without spending a fortune on bad unit economics.
Prototypes make headlines. Mass production makes incumbents richer. The missing middle is where the next generation of American industry gets built.
Impressing millions of people... robotics engineers are less impressed.
Industrial robots have been capable of this for decades.
The robot changes its orientation while keeping the tip of a long tool almost perfectly stationary above a fixed point. Peek engineering? Nope. (At least not today).
Any decent 6-axis industrial robot should be able to do this.
This is a standard application of Tool Center Point (TCP) calibration and coordinate transformations. Once the TCP is defined correctly, the controller can calculate the joint positions needed to rotate the tool around that point.
Keeping a calibrated tool tip stationary in a demonstration is relatively straightforward.
Maintaining that accuracy on a factory floor...
with changing payloads, thermal drift, mechanical deflection and imperfect calibration, is a different engineering problem.
There's also an important distinction between repeatability and absolute accuracy!
A robot can return to the same position extremely consistently while still being several millimeters away from where its mathematical model predicts it should be.
Which brings up a question worth discussing as robotics moves toward more autonomous systems:
How much of industrial robotics is already a solved problem, and how much of the difficulty lies in getting robots to work reliably outside carefully controlled conditions?
There are plenty of opportunities for startups these days, starting at the shop floor, speaking with the operators or those in charge of the numbers; identifying the biggest pain points is not easy, but definitely a good starting point to develop solutions.
Follow for more topics about robotics and AI.
——
Weekly robotics and AI insights.
Subscribe free: https://t.co/9Nm01QUcw3
We're hiring at Adam, to define AI for mechanical engineering.
$200k - $300k + significant equity + optional housing at the Adam Manor 🏡
- in person, in SF
- 60-80 hours a week
- bonus points for ex-founders and people who can ship hw + sw
$10k referrals!
Some crazy machine shops are ripping in America. K&M Machine-Fabricating in Michigan.
>378,000 sqft
>64 acre manufacturing campus
>Can machine parts up to 100,000 lbs
>Some machines have up to 60 feet of travel
>20+ horizontal and vertical CNC machines
>25+ welding machines
>50T crane capacity in the machine shop
>Builds massive parts for defense, mining, power generation, construction, and oil & gas
>Machines naval warfare structures and full armored vehicle bodies