Lewis Jones, Co-Founder, CTO, Cosmic Robotics: The first mission is already insane. The first mission is how do we help modernize the energy infrastructure while modernizing the construction industry.
James Emerick, Co-Founder, CEO, Cosmic Robotics: I think, in, general, robots are just like a force multiplier. You can do so much more. I’m James, co-founder and CEO of Cosmic Robotics. And we build robots to help build solar farms. I think we’re at a really interesting time in history where there are these three converging trends.
The first is we just need to build a lot fix our aging infrastructure. Number 2 is actually we just don’t have enough people to do this work anymore. And then the third really exciting opportunity is that we’re now at a point where robotics technology and hardware and software can move outside of the factory where robotics is traditionally played.
Jones: So solar farms today, the biggest ones have millions of solar panels. I mean, the scale is just insane. And it takes months and sometimes years to build these solar farms.
Emerick: Solar is really ripe for automation where it does look like manufacturing just done in the field, where you have really high volume of parts that are being made.
Millions of solar panels being placed on one project. They’re all the same. So it’s like standardized parts. And it’s highly repeatable, really manually-intensive, and grueling process. Where these solar panels are 70 or 80 pounds, it takes two people just to lift one up. Usually, a third person to guide it into place.
Jones: As a start-up, you’re really trying to do a bunch of impossible things over and over. Just two engineers with no money. How do you build something that’s actually still valuable to our customers and shows that we know their pain points and we know what they want to solve?
Angie Foss, Strategic Development Manager, Autodesk Research: I love to say that Autodesk Research is a learning organization. And the residency is one of our learning environments that we get a lot of insights from. Cosmic Robotics was a great fit for our residency program, particularly here in San Francisco, because of their focus on robotics, as well as sustainable energy solutions. And so it was really interesting about Cosmic Robotics is that they had a really discrete scope of work, they knew what they wanted to achieve, of what they could automate, and how robotics could really provide solutions in solar.
Emerick: I think just general prototyping and the access to the machine shop, and the CNC shop, and 3D printing lab is really incredible for early prototyping. Very privileged capability that we were allowed to utilize was actually the industrial robot arms in the robotics lab. And so those are really specialized, expensive pieces of equipment.
Nick Cote, Principal Design Roboticist, Autodesk Research: Honestly, I got cosmic started just by giving them a little bit of training and some pointers with the industrial robots. I think what Cosmic did really well is actually they took a ton of off-the-shelf technologies like hardware and software that have been improving incrementally for years now. And they cobbled them together into a workflow and to a process that is reliable and actually works.
Jones: The Autodesk Residency Program is an incredible program. When you’re starting a hardware and hard tech company, one of the most important things is to iterate quickly before you’ve really built too much. Because once you build something, it’s really hard to change what you built. And when you start out at a place like the residency program, that gives you a little bit of freedom and the resources to really just iterate polish your idea and the product vision so that you know exactly what you want to build.
Emerick: As a technology company, that’s, first of all, building hardware, and then building robots, and then getting this out into the field like software is number one. So design software to design the robot and systems to simulate and to actually start to build the product is really important. And then, of course, out in the field, the hardware needs to be rugged and reliable. But the software is really the secret sauce that allows these robots to be intelligent and to adapt to the dynamic and changing environment when they’re out in the field.
And then from our customer’s standpoint, they use software to design their projects and have GPS locations and drawings that they use. And now we can intake those. And the robot can intake it. Now, you can just upload that into the robot system. Everything stays digital.
Jones: The next real big step is actually deploying these robots at construction sites and getting that real feedback from customers and the real-world. So many people, construction feels like an outdated, slow industry. But I think there’s actually a really exciting future for construction where there’s a lot more exciting robotics and automation technology that’s starting to go into that industry. And I think we’re going through a major shift where construction is going to be a really, really exciting industry for people to go into.
AECO
AECO
Emerging Tech
