Fabrica.ai invents and builds automatic tile grouting robots to boost construction productivity and currently pilots on construction sites in Singapore managed by Woh Hup, BHCC, Gin Chia, Soilbuild, and Dragages. This should correspond to about 30% of the Singaporean market. We have early leads in the US and Europe as well. Tile grouting is the process of filling up the gaps between tiles after the tiles have been laid. Grouting is part of virtually every construction project and a highly laborious process, is considered one of the most physically damaging tasks resulting in tilers’ knees and back issues, and thus quality issues would also arise. We invented a patent pending robot that is able to automatically grout and clean tile gaps with only a press of a button. The operators would only need to reload grout and cleaning water. We believe that robots can make a lot of useful things economically feasible in the near future including e.g. construction in harsh environments (deserts, ocean, space...), and we found robotic grouting to be a low-hanging fruit to start building up our capabilities. We have also pitched at the Built Environment Demo Day 2022 organised by BCA as part of the International Built Environment Week (IBEW) and won the Rising Star Award. IBEW has drawn more than 10,000 individuals from over 100 countries.
1) Mechanical experiments and design
○ Experiments - e.g. designing variations to the grout extruder to allow less waste and better reliability
○ Design - e.g. the extruder kept falling off so it was redesigned to be held by a twist locking instead of clips
2) Mechanical manufacturing, assembly and testing
○ 3D printing - Slicing prints (some for soluble support printing), managing and repairing printers (we have Tenlog TL3, TL5, Ender 3, Prusa i3)
○ Angle grinding and drilling - 2020 alu extrusions for the robot frame, brass and steel rods
○ Assembly - putting in inserts, bolting parts together, waterproofing
○ Testing - testing the robot’s grout extrusion and cleaning, making minor adjustments to make sure everything is running properly and robot produces nice grout lines
3) Electrical experiments and design
○ Experiments - e.g. sourcing and testing various motor and driver combinations to pick for our main drive system
○ Design - e.g. PCB replacing a huge mess of wires and extending the variability and power of the control electronics; PCBs for protecting the AC power supply from back-emf voltage spikes
4) Electrical assembly
○ Soldering PCBs, soldering power cables, crimping cables
5) Arduino programming
○ E.g. Writing code for TMC2209 so that we can reduce power usage of our
stepper motors and replace force sensors with a bit of smart code.
○ Controlling the extrusion and cleaning systems, calibrating them...
6) Robotics DevOps & Real World Industry Trials
○ Understand the whole project and run our ROS2 stack on real HW.
○ Create reproducible testing methodology and evaluate metrics on the HW.
○ Be in charge of the robots on the construction site.
○ Explore and procure new parts/new materials for robot functionality improvement
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- Company:
Fabrica AI - Designation:
Hardware Engineer - Profession:
Engineering - Industry:
Electronics - Location:
Queenstown