Shipbuilder HII Partners with Path Robotics on AI

- This partnership is a key part of HII's broader "Integrated Digital Shipbuilding" (iDS) initiative, a company-wide effort to modernize shipbuilding through technologies like laser scanning, augmented reality, and additive manufacturing. The goal is to move from traditional, paper-based designs to a completely digital workflow, with the aircraft carrier *Enterprise* (CVN 80) slated to be the first ship built entirely paperless. HII has also partnered with C3 AI to apply artificial intelligence to optimize production schedules and workflows, demonstrating a deep investment in leveraging AI across their operations. - Path Robotics' core technology, a foundational AI model named Obsidian, is designed to tackle the high-mix, low-volume nature of shipbuilding, a challenge that traditional, repetitive automation has struggled with. Trained on tens of millions of inches of welding data, Obsidian uses a proprietary sensor system with lasers and optics to create 3D models of parts in real-time. This allows the robotic arm to adapt to imperfections and variations in the metal, eliminating the need for precise part placement and rigid fixtures. - The upcoming demonstration will feature live welding and, notably, "assembly." While details on the specific assembly tasks are not public, Path Robotics has developed an "Autonomous Fit-up" (AF-1) system that can autonomously pick, place, and weld small parts, suggesting the demonstration may showcase this capability for constructing sub-assemblies. This is crucial for shipbuilding, where the manual fitting of numerous small components is a significant bottleneck. - For an engineer exploring career paths, Path Robotics represents a quintessential startup experience within the industrial automation and AI space. Employee reviews describe a fast-paced and sometimes chaotic environment with rapidly changing goals, but also one with opportunities to work on challenging problems and take on significant responsibility. The engineering challenges involve a multidisciplinary skill set, including software development for control systems, machine vision, and data analysis to continuously improve the AI models. - The skilled labor shortage is a major driver for this partnership, with a projected deficit of 400,000 welders in the U.S. by 2024. Traditional robotic welding has failed to fill this gap in shipbuilding due to the lack of repeatable tasks. Path Robotics' AI-driven adaptability is the key innovation aimed at overcoming this long-standing industry challenge. - The collaboration aims to address the significant time and labor costs associated with the setup and jigging of components for welding. By creating robotic systems that can adapt to the inherent variability of large-scale steel fabrication, HII and Path Robotics are looking to reduce the 90% setup time that often dominates metal fabrication, a significant source of production delays.