With Robotic Help, Craftsmanship Shines
Artaic is a company that uses patented robotic technology and design tools to customize, design and fabricate mosaics. And with its latest innovation, Artemis, the company is poised for more.
“Our technology can help aid a design vision tremendously by virtue of the speed with which concepts can be developed and visualized, iterated and sampled,” said Ted Acworth, founder/CEO of Artaic. “For a designer to be creative, it helps if they can riff easily, fluidly, and be closely connected with the chosen medium. With our Tylist technology we provide speed and flexibility to enable the creative process to happen quickly. We also make tools available that facilitate the creative process with endless options and opportunities, including photorealistic visualizations or renderings of virtually any concepts imaginable.”
Developed by Artaic’s Robotics, Software and Manufacturing engineering teams, Artemis is Artaic’s fifth-generation robot. At one-sixth the labor cost of Artaic’s previous fourth-generation robot, Artemis enables increasingly competitive pricing starting at $20 per sq. ft. for fully custom projects, made in the U.S. Comparatively, many competitors’ pricing is often more than $100 per square foot.
With the introduction of Artemis, Artaic is able to consolidate three separate workstations into one complete, end-to-end workstation, manned by a single craftsperson who is able to take full responsibility for the quality of each job. (Previous generations of Artaic’s robots required separate workstations for sorting and assembly of tile inventory, production and quality control.) According to the company, the new end-to-end workstation, with a smaller footprint, has double the output of its predecessors.
“Cost, speed, and accuracy” are the major benefits of Artemis, Acworth said. “All are demanded at varying levels for any given project and delivered by Artaic’s newest member of the team. Because of the cost effectiveness, the mosaic project is able to be fabricated locally, domestically, which provides for a much better collaboration between the manufacturer and installer,” he added.
While the robot makes work more efficient, it’s not taking away jobs, the company said. Instead, it’s being introduced parallel to a growing employee base. It allows for existing employees to shift their roles into more creative, quality and supervisory roles working with robots, fulfilling additional needs of the company, and for new employees to join the team. For example, with one employee managing the creation of a single mosaic, craftsmanship becomes a more prominent component of the Artaic process.
“Artaic is already known for our contribution to the design and manufacturing process, and we continually hear that what we deliver, process-wise, is competitively distinctive. So looking toward the future we aim to continue to innovate and improve the process further,” Acworth said. “For instance, we hear from A&D firms that they don’t want big static expensive design libraries. Our whole sampling library strategy is to have everything on demand and customized to get designers what they need, when they need it. So we will continue to strive for the fastest possible same-day shipping of custom samples—not just of stock standard line board but of fully custom presentation boards for a designer to wow their clients when they make their presentations. Fast beautiful renderings, proposals, samples. We continue to refine that part of the process.
“In terms of production, we’re striving to bring cost down, continually, to make the mosaic medium more accessible and usable,” he added. “We just won two patents for new technologies that will be launching in the coming years and anticipate more groundbreaking efforts in our continued quest to facilitate the process, reduce the barriers, and introduce dynamic variations to our products.”
