Industry & maritime

CAD/CAM has been standard for product design for decades. Automating the tasks within that design has lagged behind: an engineer still draws by hand what is in effect a repeat of something drawn last week, within the same structural rules.

That is a different kind of AI problem from a prediction model. There is no dataset with thousands of labelled examples. What there is, are design rules: hard requirements the outcome must meet, and rules of thumb that live in the heads of experienced engineers. The work starts by getting those rules onto the table, and only then with generating.

Why generating is not the hard part

A model that produces a thousand variants is quickly built. The value is in the constraint: which variants meet the structural requirements, can be produced on the machines that are already there, and fit the existing way of working. That approach, first uncovering the design rules and then generating automatically within hard requirements, was developed on the ship hulls and later applied to custom stairlifts.

Of the three cases above, we do not name the client for two. For the stairlifts that is on substantive grounds: this work touches that manufacturer’s competitive position. That is not a formality but precisely why the work has value.

We do not supply machines or off-the-shelf production software. What we build are models and modules that run inside the design and production environment that is already there. If an existing package solves your question, we will say so; that is the honest answer more often than it sounds in this market.