Fabrica

Fabrica (Fabrica AI) is a Singapore-headquartered robotics company that develops an autonomous tile-grouting robot for the building and construction industry. The robot uses computer vision and the Robot Operating System (ROS) to map rooms in real time and fill grout lines across an apartment, navigating obstacles such as pipes and drain holes without a prior floor plan or BIM data. Operation is initiated with a single start button; human involvement is limited to loading and unloading grout and water and moving the unit between rooms separated by steps. The system also washes off excess grout and performs camera-based quality control, detecting uncleaned grout and defects on tiles, with the option to sync data to BIM.

The machine is described as compact and portable at roughly 70 kg unladen and under 70 cm on each side, capable of more than two hours of unsupervised operation between reloads, with setup time under 15 minutes every two hours. Keep-out areas and non-wall boundaries such as ledges, curbs and open entrances are demarcated using red tape. The company operates through the entity Fabrica Robotics Pte. Ltd. and maintains demo units in Phoenix, Arizona and Brno, Czechia.

Alongside the grouting product, the founding team set a direction for the company around software for designing robots through simulation, with the stated aim of shortening the multi-year cycle typically required to develop a new robot; the grouting robot was the first application of that approach.