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A new robotics company has moved to Austin, making bots designed to take on what its CEO calls the "dull, dirty and debilitating" jobs typically found in manufacturing settings.
To do that, Kane Robotics, founded in 2019, has developed collaborative robots — or co-bots — that can work seamlessly alongside humans. The robotic arms, which have sensors to halt movements if someone is too close, can be equipped to do highly accurate sanding, polishing and grinding.
The company, formerly based just east of Los Angeles in Chino, California, has been able to find niche work, often within niche industries. One of its first customers was a large aerospace company that deployed a Kane co-bot to sand the sides of rockets that were eventually launched into space.
Kane Robotic CEO John Spruce, the former CEO of California-based Advanced Steel Recovery, has a background in aerospace working with companies including Mechtronic Solutions Inc. and Hughes Space and Communications. Those connections and networks have paid off well, as the company continues to work with unnamed manufacturers of private jets, rockets and other aeronautics companies.
For example, the company has recently been sanding and polishing the canopies that go over the top of fighter jets, as well as windows for private jets and helicopter rotors. It also works with semiconductor companies and breweries.
Kane Robotics also has secured customers, as well as manufacturing partners, in the Austin area and in Dallas and Fort Worth. That's one of the reasons Kane Robotics moved its headquarters to Texas.
After its move last year, it initially located in a manufacturing co-working space in Round Rock.
But it recently moved into a 5,000-square-foot facility in North Austin near Metric and Braker, where it is setting up its equipment to demonstrate its robotics capabilities to customers and assemble its robotic arms, purchased from Universal Robots, and the gantries they're attached to.
"I say we escaped from California. You can quote me on that," Spruce said while showing off the company's robotics. "We wanted to come to Texas, and Austin seemed just very centrally located."
Kane Robotics is mostly bootstrapped, although it has raised a small amount of funding from friends and family, as well as a convertible note. Spruce said the company will likely raise additional capital in a year or so.
Kane Robotics has 14 employees, mostly engineers, and it is about to hire a new batch of interns. Spruce hopes the new, more centrally-located office will help attract additional interest from engineering students at The University of Texas and other local schools.
The company's new HQ is less than a mile from fellow robotics startup Apptronik, which has developed a humanoid robot, as well as medical robotics startup Harmonic Bionics and Contoro Robotics, which spun out of Harmonic Bionics and has a bot specialized in unloading containers.
Spruce said that Kane Robotics plans to launch a new co-bot in June that is capable of performing detailed wood sanding, largely geared toward cabinet makers. Like its other co-bots, the new systems will also be able to add computer vision equipment that allows the systems to make even more detailed decisions about where to sand or polish, as well as how deep and detailed it needs to be.
Spruce said the company has already been training its machine learning on countless hours of woodworking applications.
Kane Robotics' primary competitors include large industrial robot manufacturers, such as KUKA AG and ACME Robotics. But Spruce also noted that his company's customers are competitors in a way, because some of them have smart enough staff members to build their own robotics platforms with third-party equipment.
Generally, however, manufacturers don't want to spend the time on trial and error to mimic the types of systems Kane can deliver within a few weeks or months.
"There's so many things that we picked up over the last few years that result in improvements that would be harder to come by if you're trying to do it yourself," he said.
