Machina co-founders Babak Raeisinia (left) and Edward Mehr (proper) with a customized shaped tailgate. Supply: Machina Labs
Automotive physique manufacturing usually entails inflexible mass-production traces, with dies and presses forming sheet steel into panels and equipment. Machina Labs at the moment introduced a robotic method that it mentioned will allow car makers to convey personalized automobiles to market at mass-production costs.
“Conventional manufacturing instruments are sometimes huge, comparable in dimension to a small automotive and weighing over 20 tons,” acknowledged Ed Mehr, co-founder and CEO of Machina Labs. “With our resolution, the necessity for devoted tooling per mannequin variation is eradicated. Which means decrease undertaking capital, much less storage each in-plant and for previous fashions, which at the moment can last as long as 15 years, and sooner manufacturing changeovers.”
“The dies or molds to stamp out sheet-metal components are very costly and hulking,” he advised The Robotic Report. “They’ve to maneuver round rails and cranes, and two-thirds of amenities are full of these dies.”
Based in 2019, Machina Labs mentioned it’s “constructing the subsequent era of clever, adaptive, and software-driven factories.” The Los Angeles-based firm‘s RoboCraftsman platform integrates superior robotics and AI-driven course of controls to quickly manufacture complicated steel buildings for aerospace, protection, and automotive functions.
“We began Machina Labs as a brand new paradigm of producing, with cell-based matrix manufacturing,” Mehr mentioned. “Our program can do various things — steel forming, trimming, and high quality management — however forming is our core. With 200 to 300 of our techniques, you have got the equal of an information middle for manufacturing utilizing UGVs [uncrewed ground vehicles].”
Machina Labs modernizes sheet forming
The automotive customization and equipment business is valued at $2.4 billion in 2024 for vans alone, famous Machina Labs. Nevertheless, typical high-volume manufacturing limits the quantity of variation in automobiles and the timeframe during which they are often modified.
The firm mentioned its RoboCraftsman platform and RoboForming expertise allow a proprietary methodology of incremental sheet forming confirmed to ship personalized panels from sheet steel for floor and aerospace automobiles at excessive quantity, prime quality, and quick lead instances.
“Our course of removes the die,” Mehr defined. “Robots incrementally kind the sheet right into a form. You may get components considerably sooner. The quickest you possibly can change die making is like three months; with some sophisticated ones, it’s as much as a yr earlier than you may get your first half. With us, you may get your first half in hours after the design is finished. There are additionally sure metals that weren’t in a position to be shaped at room temperature utilizing conventional applied sciences, so we divulge heart’s contents to new alloys like titanium or nickel alloys.”
As well as, the corporate claimed that its techniques can streamline course of movement inside the manufacturing unit. Present manufacturing fashions require separate storage, repackaging, and devoted meeting lanes for customized components. Machina mentioned its techniques present on-demand half manufacturing in low volumes from cells close to the meeting line, permitting for dynamic batching or broadcast-driven manufacturing – all with out disrupting present flows.
“The automotive market shaped fashions round these cut-off dates — they needed to produce the identical automotive time and again to amortize the price of dies and molds and hold the dies and stock for 15 years to help them,” mentioned Mehr. ‘We’re taking a look at a very new market with customization. We did a topographic map of LA on the hood of 1 automotive.”
Toyota gives funding, pilot
“Our first market was protection, with high-mix, low-volume manufacturing of UAVs, plane, and missiles,” mentioned Mehr. “However I’m a automotive fanatic, and we have been fortunate to get linked with Toyota. We’re superb at making bespoke merchandise, however there’s quite a bit to find out about commonplace working procedures. We’ve spent a number of years on this collaboration to know upstream and downstream automotive processes.”
Machina Labs made its announcement at the moment at UP.Summit alongside a pilot of the expertise with Toyota Motor North America and a strategic funding from Woven Capital, Toyota’s growth-stage enterprise funding arm. The pilot undertaking will apply Machina’s RoboForming expertise to customise physique panels, with the purpose of bringing automotive-grade high quality and throughput to low-volume manufacturing.
“We envision a future the place customization is out there for each Toyota driver,” mentioned Zach Choate, basic supervisor of manufacturing engineering and core engineering manufacturing at Toyota Motor North America. “The flexibility to ship a bespoke product into the fingers of our prospects is the kind of innovation we’re enthusiastic about.”
“AI-powered manufacturing is remodeling how merchandise are designed and produced at scale,” added George Kellerman, founding managing director at Woven Capital. “Clients more and more demand extra customized merchandise, whereas engineers want sooner, more cost effective paths from idea to manufacturing with out the constraints of conventional provide chains.”
Machina plans to spend the subsequent yr to proceed studying the right way to combine its techniques into automotive manufacturing.
“We’re determining the right way to do a number of thousand automobiles or much more,” Mehr mentioned. “We’ve had electrical automobiles and autonomous automobiles, and I believe we’re now within the early phases of personalization. It’s a brand new class. Folks actually need to categorical themselves, which is what automotive making was earlier than Ford launched mass manufacturing. It was solely accessible to the wealthy, however now we will convey it again for everyone.”
