Ansel Dias

Founder & CEO of AutoFAB, Inc.

About

AutoFAB, an Autonomous Factory-in-A-Box. A single modular machine that makes and assembles hardware without human involvement.
It 3D-prints parts, places electronics, routes wiring, applies glue, fastens screws, and continuously monitors itself while it's doing all of it.
Physical AI gives robots human-level flexibility, enabling smaller, more general-purpose factories that scale in parallel.
I built the first working prototype solo in 6 weeks at The Residency in San Francisco, and presented at their demo day:

AutoFAB is made of the same parts it builds, so it can eventually build itself.
A factory that builds copies of itself doubles in capacity and grows at a geometric rate, bottlenecked only by material and energy availability.
Space has unlimited potential for resource access but is bottlenecked by earth-based manufacturing and launch capacity.
AutoFAB can launch single machines towards asteroids and have them self-replicate and produce resources to build space infrastructure in parallel.
A similar concept to Von Neumann probes, but aimed at industrializing the solar system within a few decades with a swarm of self-replicating robotic factories.

Before AutoFAB began, there was the Printerverse, a distributed manufacturing network:

It began as 3D-printing-as-a-service. To run it, I built an internal tool to automate production.
That tool became the product: I opened it up to commercial printer farms, which freed up enormous idle capacity on their machines.
On top of that capacity I built a marketplace routing orders to the nearest 3D printer on the network that could make it.
3 years of bootstrapping 500 machines over 15 locations globally taught me the real bottleneck in scaling production was the intermittent need for human labor.

As a teenager, I built a solid-state musical Tesla coil.
I hand-soldered a 4-bit computer on a bare PCB using nothing but transistors and resistors.
Custom EMG reader to read bicep flex and actuate a nylon artificial muscle.
Custom EEG reader to read the motor cortex and drive an electric wheelchair.
During COVID, I built an oxygen concentrator out of RO water purifier parts and 3D printing.

At uni, I joined an AI robotics team and worked on building a level-3 self-driving car.
We also built autonomous rovers and drones to participate in international competitions.
Won the grand prize at IGVC 2019 in Michigan for navigating an obstacle course with an autonomous ground vehicle, defeating teams from the US Army and top global universities.
Recently, I built ArmPilot, a new interface to control a robot arm from your phone and collect data to train and evaluate policies.

I specialize in building autonomous VTOL drones, quadplanes, tiltrotors, tiltwings, tailsitters, and traditional quadcopters.
I've built my own custom flight controller stack, GeminiFlight: hardware, firmware, software, and networking, all in one.
Started Udan Khatola, an assemble-it-yourself drone-kit builder and marketplace, based on GeminiFlight.
Built SkyCoach, a simulator-based learning platform for drone pilot training and certification.

Email is the best way to reach me, I reply fast.