I will start with a quote from Albert Einstein. He said 'an intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex but it
takes a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.' We take this concept very seriously here at Arrival.
Any conventional factory is still based on the model of the conveyor belt from the 1950s and before. The product goes through
all the stations in a serial way. If you want to produce multiple products in the same place, in a serial system you cannot do that
because the full system is specifically designed to produce one product, one vehicle. We are revolutionising all of this, the
Microfactory fixes all of these problems.
I'm Mike, I lead Arrival Automotive. A typical automotive assembly plant will cover millions of square feet. Because you
have to invest so much money to set up the factory, you then have to produce hundreds of thousands of vehicles, you're way over
producing for that local region. Our Microfactories cover a couple of 100,000 square feet. Our Van Microfactory, for
instance, is sized to build 10,000 vans a year when we're operating on two shifts and at that size, we believe a metro area
can support almost all of that demand. We're doing things nobody else has done before and it takes a very unique mix of talents
that bring that to life.
Hi, this is Napo, I'm the Chief of Mobile Robotics here at Arrival. The Microfactory is basically built around two main
components. For your robotic cell, which is the factory inside the factory. Think about it as a cluster of robotic arms. It's
completely driven by computer vision and several forms of AI based control. And then you have the glue connecting all the
elements inside the factory, all the cells, this technology is mobile robotics. So robots that move in the environment
autonomously, robots that interact with the cells and with any other robotic factory. We are reactive, we are adaptable, we are
reconfigurable. This is the DNA of the Microfactory.
The cell architecture is really, really exciting, and it's really unique. My name is Raj Vyas, my role is to develop the assembly
processes, which allow us to build these Microfactories. We're developing these Microfactory cells. On average, 20 metres by 20
metres and those cells allow us to build a huge number of different products. That gives us scalability, modularity, and
automation.
We aren't really a vehicle manufacturing company and I say that because if you look at the people in the company, half of them
are software engineers. So, we are, at our heart, a tech company. I can tell you, that's dramatically different than a traditional
vehicle manufacturer. One of the great enablers of the Microfactory approach is keeping the capital, the investment in
the Microfactory, relatively low because that's what allows us to build many of them. And so in the case of robots, we are buying
very standard robots that several different companies produce. What we're developing inside the company is very sophisticated
software.
In robotics, semantics is the study of understanding. How does the robot calculate his location in the space inside the
Microfactory? By developing AI tools to calculate all these features of semantics, we build systems that are capable of
interacting. This is extremely powerful, because we are basically moving from what I would call the glorified automation to
advanced robotics on the shop floor. It's a key feature of the Microfactory.
Our software team, they're developing advanced vision systems. Our goal is to put those vision systems on these robots. So the
robot will go into a particular location, pick up certain parts and identify where those parts are using advanced sensors. Once
they've identified those parts, pick those parts up and locate them into position.
We're supporting this idea of local manufacturing and we're part of a community, we're not only creating jobs, we're paying taxes.
We really see this idea of distributed manufacturing as a much more beneficial model to the communities where we're located than
the more traditional approach.
The Microfactory concept is phenomenal. The product is made here, it stays locally and it's electric. That helps our air quality
and it helps our citizens. My name is David Swenson. I'm the Director for Economic Development in York County, South Carolina.
The economic impact, can't say enough about the investment that's being made, the fiscal impact that has in our community, the
social impact of what it will do to bring jobs, and the interaction our community will have with a cutting edge
technology company making electric vehicles is exciting.
Our vision is, over time, hundreds of Microfactories scattered all over the world. It's not a question about are there even more
opportunities? It's which opportunities do we want to explore first? We're using Microfactories and the Microfactory approach
to produce vehicles but I don't see any reason why this same idea can't be applied to other manufactured goods. The most profound
technologies are the ones that become interwoven into the way that you live your life and the way that the society operates.
And eventually they become such an integral part of the way things are done that you forget they're there. They just become
the way that things are done and I think what Arrival is developing could well be technologies along those lines.