Future Production

A few years ago, 3D-Printing was considered a toy at worst or a means to do prototyping at best. Reason for this was not mostly technology but simply economics. Today, lot sizes of 100 or annual production volumes of 100.000 pieces can effectively be produced with modern additive manufacturing technologies. In combination with modern AI this can further reduce cost for design, tooling or overall production and decrease time-to-customer.

A few years ago, lightweight semi-collaborative robots were only usable as fancy demonstrators or in very few applications – today, even though low-fidelity robots may not be as precise or capable to lift as heavy weights as industrial robots, the fact that they are available for one tenth of the price or less makes them economical for many applications, which would have previously not been solved with a robot just because it saves a few seconds time of an operator. And these new robots can even be economic if they stand still 90% of the time.

A few years ago, training an AI for design improvements was done when and where it really mattered – e.g. Aerospace parts needing to save that critical gram of mass, automotive parts manufactured by the million. Training them had been complex and costly and required lots of data. Today, better AI training approaches can train such systems with few data points, at lower cost and for broader applications. AI design improvements can be used as part of a workflow to refurbish parts for circular economy business models, or in high-mix low-volume setting for gaining efficiency.