Machina Labs (Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.) has announced general availability of the Machina Deployable System, a commercially available portable robotic system that digitally forms and cuts custom composite and metal parts. Combining the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics with portability, the company’s Deployable System empowers manufacturers in a wide variety of industries to elevate production capabilities with minimum disruption to facilities.

Machina Labs is now making its RoboForming technology available as an on-premise, standalone option to virtually any manufacturing site or other production facilities — including those with remote locations, such as an aircraft carrier — where it can be installed into an existing environment without significant foundational facility changes and work with any industrial robot. Machina says its customers already use this offering for tooling, sustainment, R&D, rapid prototyping and production to rapidly produce large, complex sheet metal parts at the point of use. The Machina Deployable System can form virtually any metal (aluminum, steel, titanium, Inconel and more) up to thicknesses of ¼" and into parts as large as 12' × 5' × 4'. If it bends, the Machina Deployable System can form it.

From small, custom workshops to large-scale manufacturing facilities, the Deployable System is said to redefine the possibilities of on-demand manufacturing, rapid prototyping, and agile hardware development and production. It consists of a portable platform, two seven-axis robotic arms from KUKA Robotics (Augsburg, Germany), toolchanging corral, configurable frame, along with AI-driven process controls. The system can be transported on the back of a truck and can be up and running in a matter of hours on-premise and work with any industrial robot.