Dustin Walper
@DustinWalper • 8,967 subscribers
Founder of @ValstadShip. We're building the machine that builds the ships.
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We've never published this entire video before, but... what the hell. This is our vision for the shipyard of the future. This is how we fight back against China's shipbuilding dominance. This is how we produce 10x more in a single shipyard. From raw steel in to a full set of panels out, ready for erection. All autonomous. Every crane move, every assembly step, every weld... controlled by software we're building from the ground up. Our roadmap will see us build every part of this as modular, inexpensive cells that stretch standard industrial robots to their payload & reach limits. Cells we can build in months instead of years. We're starting in Austin, shipping out panel kits that accelerate the shipbuilding process for America's over-stretched and labor-starved shipyards. Then we'll deploy systems like this all over the country to accelerate production of everything from tank barges to tankers to unmanned surface vessels. It's possible to do this in America. I know because we're doing it. And because it must be done. Time to Accelerate American Shipbuilding.
Dustin Walper107,539 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Okay, we went completely overboard... BUT. Here's a short snippet of the 7+ minute, fully-animated rendering of what will be BY FAR the most advanced shipyard ever built in America. We spent the last two months working on it. And we'll spend the next 1.5 years making it real.
Dustin Walper129,481 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
This is a highly advanced shipbuilding factory in China, covering 1757 acres and producing 400 inland vessels per year. It’s no exaggeration to say this is miles ahead of anything in the US - and it’s why our “gigafactory for ships” concept is so urgent. We need to accelerate.
Dustin Walper144,876 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten
This will get a lot faster - shortening the hold time, deleting the “return to home position”, speeding up the robots… but it’s an exciting early glimpse of what we’re building. This is a sub-scale but otherwise accurate piece of a ship hull made with 3/8” steel plate and extruded angle. At full-scale the plate will be up to 40’ long. Our software generates the sequence of operations and calculates optimal trajectories based on the 3D model of our design. We won’t need to retool for different plate thickness, stiffener spacing, or even to add transverse members, brackets, etc. Our next version of this setup will include more extensive robot calibration and computer vision to allow us to precisely pick up arbitrarily-shaped structural members and place them accurately. Our software will also extend all the way through the process, picking plate & profiles from storage, running it through material prep operations, and even generating nesting layouts for the cutting table, removing scrap and directing the cut parts towards the correct assembly area to be picked and placed by robots. And there will be opportunities to deploy no-bullshit, useful AI agents to monitor the process, reflow production if there’s an issue somewhere on the line, generate work instructions for humans where needed and generally reduce the amount of human labor needed for oversight. If we succeed at all of this it will be hands down the most advanced shipbuilding process in the world. Early days still, but we won’t stop until we make it happen.
Dustin Walper32,497 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
Testing out version 2 of our system, with two robots on independent carriages co-operating to carry out assembly tasks. This was manually programmed to gut-check the approach (learning: we're redesigning our gripper to prevent arc blow... Jim Belosic (SendCutSend) will be getting more business from us soon). The next step is to build the same part using internal software (e.g. no programming, 100% driven by the model) that plans everything from sequencing to weld paths and 7DOF robot kinematics. It’s a hard software problem, but once perfected will allow us to build at blazing speed.
Dustin Walper21,265 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
One small step for shipbuilding, one giant leap for Valstad. Our custom software stack is now controlling the robots. Ingest CAD model, generate robot instructions. Zero manual programming. We'll be open-sourcing the FANUC drivers we wrote to do this shortly.
Dustin Walper24,921 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten
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