The factory arrives in a shipping container! 🏗️
I had a chance to meet and talk to Mollie Claypool, CEO and co-founder of
@_auar, in London.
What they ship to a builder's site is a robotic microfactory inside a container.
It builds the entire structure of a home, and Mollie put a range on it I hadn't heard before: anything from a single storey up to six or seven.
Her framing is industrialised production delivered on site, on demand, wherever it's needed and when it's needed.
The software is called MasterBuilder, and she calls it the brain of the microfactory. It takes a home builder's design, translates it into everything the microfactory needs to manufacture it, then drives the production itself.
The part I pushed on is why the facility doesn't look like conventional industrial automation, and the answer turned out to be the material.
Timber has bow. It has twist. It has bits taken out of it. Every board is slightly wrong in its own way, and a fixed program has no answer for that.
MasterBuilder senses the environment and the material it's touching, and reacts in real time to whatever is actually in front of it.
That's the line between automation and physical AI, drawn in a material people have been building with for thousands of years.
Thanks Mollie for the time, and for explaining it that clearly 👏🏼
Always hypnotizing to see
@ABBRobotics robots work in new industries ;)
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