There's a debilitating labor shortage
in the manufacturing industry right now.
For every ten people
that leave the manufacturing sector as machine operators,
only one person comes in.
And it creates a massive labor gap.
The industry desperately needs a solution
that's easy to use, that’s inexpensive
and that can be installed very quickly.
About three years ago,
Rapid Robotics developed the first robotic arm solution
that out of the box knows how to perform ubiquitous tasks
in a manufacturing facility.
So things like injection molding, and running a pad printer,
putting parts into CNC machines.
End of arm tooling and part manipulation
is one of the most complex parts of programing a robot.
You can buy grippers off the shelf, right?
Pinch grippers, suction grippers.
And they range from $3,500 dollars up to $50,000 or $60,000 dollars,
depending on the complexity of the gripper.
And maybe you have that in your budget,
but then you have to wait two or three month lead times
to get that gripper in.
And before you can even start programing that gripper into the arm.
And they come with inherent issues.
They are not designed
for the specific parts that we are going to be manipulating.
In traditional design, through CNC-ing and other operations
where you have to outsource design, outsource parts,
it would take months.
It was a task that was impossible with traditional systems integration,
which is where Markforged comes in.
We recently had a customer with this very complex part geometry
that is introducing parts with three individual workers by hand out of tubs
to their larger assembly machine.
What they needed us to do was to create a way
to introduce these parts faster, more reliably.
3D printing allowed us to try a bunch of different things, try them quickly.
The whole stage of the gripper iterations that you see here
is in less than a month and a half.
It comes in on the end of the robot, grabs the parts from that nest like so,
dragging up and over into the customer's input fixture
opening, and releasing.
And then we end up having a reliable solution for our customer
that's actually going out on site starting tomorrow.
One of the coolest things about Rapid
is the diversity of use cases that we can deliver on
because we're 3D printing all of our end-of-arm tooling.
So we're producing parts like Frisbees.
PCR chips for COVID tests, filling prescriptions.
We're working on PCBs, we're doing material handling,
we're working with medical devices, automotive companies.
No two deployments are the same.
Every robot is fully customized.
Every part is completely different.
We need Markforged in order to get our robots
to fit to any solution possible.
Our journey with Markforged started basically the day we started the company.
We needed to be able to print with materials
that were quick to print, as well as affordable to print,
and incredibly solid and rigid.
Having worked with a bunch of different 3D printers over my career,
the Markforged printers do really stand out
in the quality of the build plate, the adhesion, the material quality.
What I really like about the Onyx material is that
it can take a lot of shear force, can take impact even.
It holds up better than any other material that we've used.
When we had to make a decision on a 3D printer,
one of the most important things was,
can it print continuous carbon fiber?
We've been deploying robots with grippers
that were printed on Markforged printers since day one,
and we have never had a gripper break in the field.
We're able to, in 12 hours,
have a brand new gripper that is a perfect fit,
that's going to be highly reliable,
that also weighs about 30% of the total weight of an off-the-shelf gripper.
And that is game changing.
We have a bank of ten Markforged 3D printers here in San Francisco.
We also have a bank of 15 of them in our Detroit office
that services mostly the automotive industry.
And so we anticipate that the growth with Markforged
is going to just continue and continue
as we're deploying more and more robots.
The biggest hurdle for Rapid so far has been educating the market
that it is actually possible now to automate all of these simple tasks
that previously were not automatable
due to cost, timelines, and complexity.
We started the company very specifically
to serve small and medium-sized manufacturing businesses,
and we can automate for them because of the flexibility
of being able to customize the end-of-arm tooling,
and print it in a way that's highly reliable.
What the end result is, is that with Markforged 3D printers,
we can help reshore more manufacturing of these simple tasks back to the U.S.