July 5

It’s Friday and the 3DCP news keeps rolling in. Earlier this week we heard about struggles at Shapeways now we have Desktop Metals being sold at pennies on the dollar of their initial IPO price. $DM which hit the market at $97 a share in 2019 sold for $5.50 a share.

Obviously one company does not define the whole market but it is an important reminder that 3D printing businesses are not easy. Many people are drawn to automation because they imagine sitting back and relaxing while the robots do the work but as you can see with Desktop Metals that plan doesn’t always work.

Another humanoid robot company has sprung up in China, they are appearing rapidly now, this means when highly compelling use cases for the general public are developed things will scale very quickly. The question may soon become who is best at manufacturing the most bots fastest. Currently the question is mostly about software. Custom actuators were needed for the strength, precision and back-drivability and hands are quite tricky but these mechanical hurdles have largely been overcome with clear paths forward to improve. The rapid increase in humanoid robot competition is likely due to AI advancements and as this bleeds in to hardware these bots will become ever more capable until they can just observe a task once and repeat it.

Here is an incredible time lapse video of a wasp building a nest, it’s fascinating how it works alone I would have imagined being a swarming species more than one would team up for domicile construction.

Why is nobody building pterodactyl sized wasps to exploit for human housing construction?

Figure AI is ending the Figure 1 production run and moving on to what we can only presume will be called Figure 2. The Figure 2 bot will be deployed in the Spartanburg plant.

Menteebot demonstrates their robot following a person around with full autonomy powered by an LLM OS.

Thanks for sticking around, moving the newsletter from ~monthly to daily has been a fun shift in the Automate Construction operation. This gives me an outlet to share things I haven’t spent as much time with as 3D printed construction but as I learn more it’s very possible you will see me make videos on these topics in the future. Exploring innovative potential housing solutions is what I love to do every day and this newsletter is me sharing that exploration with you.

I am not a guru, just an explorer.