Last month you very probably saw the epic, unapologetically American challenge issued by Megabots via YouTube to Japan-based Suidobashi Heavy Industries proposing the two companies have their two giant 15 ft robots fight. Suidobashi, who call their giant robot the “Kuratas,” accepted. Between them, their two challenge videos have been viewed almost 10 million times. And there have been over 1,100 news articles published.

“You grew up hoping that the giant robot battles of science fiction would become real, and we did too.

That dream is one-year away.” – Matt Oehrlein, Co-Founder of Megabots.

Now, the two companies just need to make their robots combat ready.

“We’ve been working with the MegaBots guys since the beginning and we’re gonna make sure they haveall of the hardware and software they need to beat KURATAS!” – Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk

It’s true. Autodesk is super serious about our love of Megabots. We’ve been big fans since we first met Gui and crew working out of Artisan’s Asylum in Boston. We hosted them at Autodesk University and used their cannon to fire t-shirts at our attendees.  We partnered at Maker Faire San Francisco to delight attendees with the artistic paintball-induced destruction of a car. We’ve given them access to our world-class Pier 9 manufacturing facility in San Francisco and given them our full suite of Autodesk software to create.

Why? Very simply, Megabots personifies the future of making things.

The means of production are changing.

The old ways of making things have changed. Building stuff isn’t about secluded teams, tired ideas, and waiting forever to secure lines of credit for prohibitively expensive initial investments. The future of making relies on communication expansion and connectivity. Organizations like Megabots work collaboratively on design projects across the globe and reacts to local taste and culture to produce on-point content. Megabots found a way to involve those passionate about robots by crowd sourcing the development of their turret cannon (and they used A360 to do it). They’re using crowd funding to avoid large capital requirements. This nimble and collective creation method means their new ideas are brought to market faster, by anyone.

The future of manufacturing is highly customized.

“We’re building the science fiction sports league of the future, one giant robot fight at a time,” said

Gui Cavalcanti, MegaBots CEO.

Gone are the days of settling for good enough with what you find on the shelf.  Megabots long-term vision is to build starter kits to help teams help themselves. Can you imagine highly personalized robot warriors representing your city?  Megabots can. And they aren’t the only company with this type of customize-to-fit mentality.  The rise of economic prosperity around the globe has caused consumers to demand it. Now larger  populations are connected and educated about products, and have more choices around which products they purchase.  Aesthetics, personalization, sustainability, manufacturing location now have greater impacts as these are important to consumers.  The future is customized and Megabots is proving it.

Where does Fusion 360 come in?

Do you want your own mini Megabot? Of course you do.  We at Fusion 360 are helping them do it!  Gui and Matt recently compleleted a very successful Kickstarter campaign and didn’t want to just settle for providing rewards based on their last generation model. Last year we worked with them to make a totally 3D printable version of their “Mark 2” but this time they wanted better.  They weren’t willing to settle for a long lead time manufacturing run to injection mold on last year’s model.  Instead Megabots will be using on-demand 3D printing to provide their current Megabot vision as one of their Kickstarter sponsor rewards.  Fusion 360 is a great tool for cranking out design concepts that are highly creative and complex while still producing robust, manufacturable geometry.  So, their first-generation concept to turn the Mk2 into ‘Murricabot is quite literally the same model they are using for their Kickstarter reward.  How’s that for Kickstarter backers being involved in the process?

But wait there’s more…

Where it makes sense, we’ll be seeing Fusion 360 used as the primary CAD tool of choice for this next go around of manufacturing design. And, we still anticipate a need to use Inventor, too. We’re proud to compliment Fusion 360 with the power of our broader Autodesk solution set. Primarily, we simply feel that Fusion 360 is the future of designing and we’re very excited to involve our team and resources to help make Megabots a tremendous success and learn along the way.

More to come…

The Fusion 360 Team