Hi everyone and welcome to Blue Robotics. I'm Rusty and I'm at our main facility in Torrance
California. Today I'm going to show you where our products are made, show you some of the cool
tools we use in the process, and introduce you to some of the cool humans that bring our products
to life. Let's go!
If you're watching this video and don't know anything about Blue Robotics,
we're a team of about 50 people working to enable the future of underwater robotics.
Over the last couple years, we've put a huge amount of effort into our production lines to
ensure that we can consistently deliver really high quality products. This building over here,
which was formerly a Los Angeles film studio, has been our home since 2018. Today I'm going to give
you a tour of our main manufacturing floor and show you some of our individual production lines.
Off to my right here is our shipping area where we store our finished goods and we pack up orders and
ship them out to you every day. One of our first and most important products is our underwater
thruster like this T200 here. Behind me here is our thruster production line. Let's go take a look!
Like all of our production lines, each thruster starts off as a job number and
a traveler which we use to track quality and consistency throughout the process.
Let's go take a look at each of the steps.
First off here, Phong is working with this stator press to install stators on the thruster base.
Over here is our purpose-built bearing press for installing the plastic bushings on the thrusters.
We call it "Johan the Bearing Press". Aaron here is installing some bearings on thrusters right now.
One of the most important steps in the process is the potting that seals the cable and wires of
the thruster. Will over here is doing that with a precision epoxy dispensing machine.
The most recent addition to this production line is the WetLink Penetrator station
where we install a compression gland penetrator on the thruster cable. JP is putting together some of
those right now. He puts the plug and seal on the cable and then uses a computerized nut runner to
fasten the plug. He's able to view torque data to tell if there are any issues during that process.
After that he runs a high voltage insulation test and an air leak test to ensure that the thruster
is both airtight and watertight. We care a lot about the quality and consistency of our products
and all of these tools and processes help us to accomplish that. At two points in the process once
in the middle and once at the end each thruster is inspected by our quality inspector, Robert.
Anything that he finds ends up on these shelves here where we can diagnose the problem
and figure out a solution. We have a whole team of manufacturing engineers dedicated to making
our products and processes better every day. Let's go check out our packing and ROV lines!
A lot of our products like our watertight enclosures and electronics are packed products. Shawn and Adrian
here are packing up some of those right now. You can also see inventory along the wall here.
We keep a lot of inventory on hand to make sure that we can continue building our products all the time.
the ROV and ROV accessory production area is behind me now. Let's go check that out!
The ROV is sold as a kit but we put together a few of the key parts. Over here on my left Tyler and
Kevin are putting together and inspecting the ROV electronics enclosure and over here on my right
Malea is putting together the Fathom-X Tether Interface box. At the end of this line all of the
parts end up going to our ROV packing area where they're packed up into kits ready for the store.
Next we're going to check out the sensors, lights, gripper, and sonar production area.
In this room are individual stations for each of the products each with dedicated tools and parts
like this like these Lumen stations over here. They all share one WetLink
Penetrator station to put together all of the cables and Abraham's manning that right now.
In front of them here is the Newton Gripper station
and over here Roth is quality inspecting some Lumens that are in progress at the quality station.
Alejandra is building pressure sensors at the pressure and temperature sensor station.
And then last back here we've got the Ping Sonar station with a few in progress Pings
and Angel over here is working on Ping360s.
I've got one more production area to show you. Follow me!
In the back of our facility is one more important production room. This room was
actually originally built as a refrigerator and 60 years ago there were barrels of wine
in here getting ready for transport but today, we use it as a cable processing room.
Over here on one side we have a machine to cut long lengths of neutrally buoyant tether
cable before we put connectors on either end. And then on the other side we've got a
machine to process shorter lengths of cable like that used on our thrusters and lights.
Nick here is cutting some cables for the BlueROV2 battery cable right now.
Both of these machines make our job much easier and more precise.
That's it thanks for taking the tour and for seeing where Blue Robotics products are made.
We started out of a garage with your support on Kickstarter back in 2014 and we're really proud
of where we've come and with the quality and consistency that we're able to build into our
products here. Well, I've got to go back to work, but thanks for watching, and see you next time!