Seeing that the construction industry’s productivity has stagnated over the last few decades, Fabrica AI identified it as a good opportunity for technological arbitrage. “It is a blue ocean where many young tech entrepreneurs like myself would not have thought about venturing into,” said Keefe Wayne Teo, Co-Founder (COO&CFO) of Fabrica AI.
When ideating and developing a robot takes days not years
Fabrica AI’s automatic tile grouting robot boosts productivity by five times and are currently carrying out pilots at construction sites in Singapore managed by Woh Hup, BHCC, Gin Chia, Soilbuild, Chan Rong Fen and Dragages. Grouting is a highly laborious process that is part of every construction project, and it is one of the most physically damaging tasks resulting in tilers’ knees and back issues, and thus quality issues often arise. The patent pending robot can automatically grout and clean tile gaps with only a press of a button, the operators only need to reload grout and water.
By training end to end controls in simulation and through reinforcement learning combined with iterating hardware designs, Fabrica AI aims to automate the whole development process. “At the current stage, the most important resource is a large fleet of robots to validate our approaches for our AI system and to collect data. This keeps us grounded as we build our Fabricator Platform, which we hope to acquire the first paying customers for by the end of 2024,” said Keefe.