Fabrica.ai builds automatic tile grouting robots and is currently piloting on construction sites in Singapore, managed by Woh Hup, BHCC, Gin Chia. We have early leads in the US and Europe as well.
Tile grouting fills up the gaps between tiles after the tiles have been laid. Grouting is part of virtually every construction project and, a highly laborious process, is considered one of the most physically damaging tasks resulting in tilers’ knees and back issues. Thus, quality issues would also arise.
Project: Automatic Tile Grouting Robots to Boost Construction Productivity
You will take robots from new designs to real-world industry trials. You may be reimbursed with a combination of salary and share options. The following tracks are available, and you would probably be doing a couple of them up to your preference, with examples of what has been done by previous interns (plus most of the assembly has been done by Trainees):
1) Mechanical experiments and design:
- Experiments, e.g. designing variations to the grout extruder to allow less waste and better reliability.
- Design, e.g. the extruder kept falling off, so it was redesigned to be held by a twist locking instead of clips.
2) Mechanical manufacturing, assembly and testing:
-3D printing - Slicing prints (some for soluble support printing), managing and repairing printers (we have Tenlog TL3, TL5, Ender 3, Prusa i3).
-Angle grinding and drilling - 2020 alu extrusions for the robot frame, brass and steel rods.
-Assembly - putting in inserts, bolting parts together, waterproofing.
-Testing - testing the robot’s grout extrusion and cleaning, making minor adjustments to ensure everything is running properly and the robot produces nice grout lines.
3) Electrical experiments and design:
-Experiments - e.g. sourcing and testing various motor and driver combinations to pick for our main drive system.
-Design - e.g. PCB replacing a huge mess of wires and extending the variability and power of the control electronics; PCBs for protecting the AC power supply from back-emf voltage spikes.
4) Electrical assembly:
-Soldering PCBs, soldering power cables, crimping cables.
5) Arduino programming
-E.g. Writing code for TMC2209 so that we can reduce power usage of our stepper motors and replace force sensors with a bit of smart code.
-Controlling the extrusion and cleaning systems, calibrating them…
6) Robotics DevOps & Real World Industry Trials:
-Understand the whole project and run our ROS2 stack on real HW.
-Create reproducible testing methodology and evaluate metrics on the HW.
-Be in charge of the robots on the construction site.
-Explore and procure new parts/new materials for robot functionality improvement.
Our development process is very iterative and agile. Hence, the tasks are likely to evolve, e.g. there would not be a concrete plan more than 2 weeks ahead. You would play a significant part in deciding how your work would contribute to the main goals. If you like this process, you’d be a good fit for us.
