The assembly line
Preparing…
The assembly line
How it’s made
The product, whole
One vehicle. Every part of it had to be designed — the structure, the electronics, the power path, the factory that builds it. IGES AI designs all of it.
The assembly line
It comes apart
Body, chassis, drive units and battery pack separate along their own axes. Each piece from here on is a discipline, and each discipline is a platform.
iElectronics
Into the pack, onto the board
The pack drops out of the floor, and the drive unit bolted under it opens. One board, two domains: SiC power stages turning pack DC into three-phase AC, and the redundant compute reading eight cameras and the LiDAR, with a milled slot holding them apart. Three orange cables take U, V and W out to the machine that spends them — hairpin stator, a rotor of buried magnets, a 9:1 helical reduction, halfshafts. iElectronics takes a description of what a board has to do and returns the schematic and the routed layout.
Open iElectronicsiMechanics
The enclosure, sectioned
None of that survives a road without something around it. A cast aluminium housing closes over the power stage — half-sectioned here, the way the motor is, so the inside stays visible. A gasket seated in a milled groove and a bolted flange all the way round: this is a sealed unit, and the seal is the detail that says so. Coolant galleries run through the walls and the lid on the loop the cold plate under the modules and the jacket around the stator are already on, and the lid comes down onto the SiC modules as a boss on a thermal interface pad, because in a sealed box the casting is the heat path. Last to arrive is the thermal field, which is what decides how thick the wall has to be. iMechanics takes the parts that have to fit and returns the enclosure that fits them, sealed, cooled, and analysed.
Open iMechanicsiRobotics
Built at volume
This is the first beat that runs forwards. The shot pulls back off the housing and the cell it is built in is already around it: an indexing conveyor, a casting on every pallet, and three arms with three different tools — a spreader gripper laying the board in, a vacuum head landing the lid, a nutrunner walking the flange. Every angle in it is forward kinematics on a taught trajectory, joints interpolated between waypoints as a function of the one number this page is made of, which is why the board is exactly in the gripper rather than near it and why the line runs the same on the way back up. Nothing here is one clever robot. It is a cycle time, repeated. iRobotics takes the cell you want and returns the layout, the reach study and the program in the language of the arms actually in it — URScript, RAPID, FANUC TP, KUKA KRL.
Open iRoboticsiSCADA
The floor, instrumented
One cell is a rate. A plant is that cell repeated down a floor — and what makes a floor a floor, rather than a room with robots in it, is that somebody knows what all of it is doing. Every station carries a stack light, every stack light is a tag, and the board over the aisle is those tags drawn as the line they belong to. Line 1's lid station is amber. That is why line 1 is not moving, why the plant rate on the board is falling and the work in progress is climbing, and why the far line — which you cannot see through the haze — is still green. None of that is legible in the machinery. All of it is legible in the layer over it. iSCADA takes the tags a plant already produces and returns the HMI screens, the alarm logic and the trends a control room runs it from.
Open iSCADAiElectrical
What powers it
None of that floor moves without somewhere to plug it in. This is the low-voltage lineup at the head of the lines: an incoming transformer, a 2000A main, a busbar, and one cubicle per feeder. The door on line 3's is open, because a panel is only a box until you can see the vertical bus, the moulded-case breaker under it, the drives and the terminals at the bottom. On the board above it is the single line — the drawing this all comes from. Then a fault on line 3, and the point of the whole beat: -CB203 clears it in twenty milliseconds and -CB101 above it does not move, so seven sections stay live and three lines keep running. That is discrimination, and it is a study rather than an opinion — the two curves on the sheet never touch. iElectrical takes the loads a plant has and returns the distribution that feeds them: single line, panel layout, cable sizing, and the protection settings that make one fault one fault.
Open iElectricaliPE
Signed off
Every beat so far has produced something. This one is about the last thing that happens before any of it gets built: somebody licensed reads the drawing and puts their name behind it. The sheet from the switchroom comes up close and the review lands on it -- three findings, clouded and balloned in red the way a drawing has been marked up since drawings were on paper. Two are comments and answer without changing anything. The third is a hold: the breaker's overload setting is above the rating of the cable it protects, and no amount of agreeing about it makes the cable thicker. So the setting is struck through, 250 A is written in beside it, the revision goes from A to B, and only then does the seal come down. That order is the whole beat. A package is not sealed and then corrected. iPE prepares the package, tracks the findings and holds the revision -- and a licensed Professional Engineer, who is a person and not this software, is the one who seals it.
Open iPEiERP
The company around it
Eight beats produced a thing. This one produces the only object on the page that is still there once the thing has gone. The camera reverses out of the switchroom -- the first time it has backed up since the floor -- and the plant opens out behind a board on the next aisle down. On it: one serial, six documents, four counters and a date in 2031. The sealed drawing does not leave, it goes quiet on the wall and comes back as line one of the register. Line five is a work order that was held, and the reason on it is the amber lamp from four beats ago: line 1's lid station faulted, so the housing went to QA hold, so the manufacturing certificate on line six could not be issued until it cleared. That is the whole argument of a system of record -- a fault on a floor is a document somewhere else, and the document is what is left. iERP takes the parts, the people and the paperwork a plant already generates and returns the system around them: procurement, inventory, production, quality, assets, and the warranty that outlives the build.
Open iERPThe nine scenes
Each platform picks up the story
The teardown has run out of the pack into the enclosure around it, forward again into the robot cell that builds it, and back once more to the floor of cells that cell is one of. It carries on out to what powers the plant, through the review that signs it off, and back to the company behind all of it.
- 01
The product, whole
One vehicle. Every part of it had to be designed — the structure, the electronics, the power path, the factory that builds it. IGES AI designs all of it.
- 02
It comes apart
Body, chassis, drive units and battery pack separate along their own axes. Each piece from here on is a discipline, and each discipline is a platform.
The pack drops out of the floor, and the drive unit bolted under it opens. One board, two domains: SiC power stages turning pack DC into three-phase AC, and the redundant compute reading eight cameras and the LiDAR, with a milled slot holding them apart. Three orange cables take U, V and W out to the machine that spends them — hairpin stator, a rotor of buried magnets, a 9:1 helical reduction, halfshafts. iElectronics takes a description of what a board has to do and returns the schematic and the routed layout.
Open iElectronicsNone of that survives a road without something around it. A cast aluminium housing closes over the power stage — half-sectioned here, the way the motor is, so the inside stays visible. A gasket seated in a milled groove and a bolted flange all the way round: this is a sealed unit, and the seal is the detail that says so. Coolant galleries run through the walls and the lid on the loop the cold plate under the modules and the jacket around the stator are already on, and the lid comes down onto the SiC modules as a boss on a thermal interface pad, because in a sealed box the casting is the heat path. Last to arrive is the thermal field, which is what decides how thick the wall has to be. iMechanics takes the parts that have to fit and returns the enclosure that fits them, sealed, cooled, and analysed.
Open iMechanicsThis is the first beat that runs forwards. The shot pulls back off the housing and the cell it is built in is already around it: an indexing conveyor, a casting on every pallet, and three arms with three different tools — a spreader gripper laying the board in, a vacuum head landing the lid, a nutrunner walking the flange. Every angle in it is forward kinematics on a taught trajectory, joints interpolated between waypoints as a function of the one number this page is made of, which is why the board is exactly in the gripper rather than near it and why the line runs the same on the way back up. Nothing here is one clever robot. It is a cycle time, repeated. iRobotics takes the cell you want and returns the layout, the reach study and the program in the language of the arms actually in it — URScript, RAPID, FANUC TP, KUKA KRL.
Open iRoboticsOne cell is a rate. A plant is that cell repeated down a floor — and what makes a floor a floor, rather than a room with robots in it, is that somebody knows what all of it is doing. Every station carries a stack light, every stack light is a tag, and the board over the aisle is those tags drawn as the line they belong to. Line 1's lid station is amber. That is why line 1 is not moving, why the plant rate on the board is falling and the work in progress is climbing, and why the far line — which you cannot see through the haze — is still green. None of that is legible in the machinery. All of it is legible in the layer over it. iSCADA takes the tags a plant already produces and returns the HMI screens, the alarm logic and the trends a control room runs it from.
Open iSCADANone of that floor moves without somewhere to plug it in. This is the low-voltage lineup at the head of the lines: an incoming transformer, a 2000A main, a busbar, and one cubicle per feeder. The door on line 3's is open, because a panel is only a box until you can see the vertical bus, the moulded-case breaker under it, the drives and the terminals at the bottom. On the board above it is the single line — the drawing this all comes from. Then a fault on line 3, and the point of the whole beat: -CB203 clears it in twenty milliseconds and -CB101 above it does not move, so seven sections stay live and three lines keep running. That is discrimination, and it is a study rather than an opinion — the two curves on the sheet never touch. iElectrical takes the loads a plant has and returns the distribution that feeds them: single line, panel layout, cable sizing, and the protection settings that make one fault one fault.
Open iElectricalEvery beat so far has produced something. This one is about the last thing that happens before any of it gets built: somebody licensed reads the drawing and puts their name behind it. The sheet from the switchroom comes up close and the review lands on it -- three findings, clouded and balloned in red the way a drawing has been marked up since drawings were on paper. Two are comments and answer without changing anything. The third is a hold: the breaker's overload setting is above the rating of the cable it protects, and no amount of agreeing about it makes the cable thicker. So the setting is struck through, 250 A is written in beside it, the revision goes from A to B, and only then does the seal come down. That order is the whole beat. A package is not sealed and then corrected. iPE prepares the package, tracks the findings and holds the revision -- and a licensed Professional Engineer, who is a person and not this software, is the one who seals it.
Open iPEEight beats produced a thing. This one produces the only object on the page that is still there once the thing has gone. The camera reverses out of the switchroom -- the first time it has backed up since the floor -- and the plant opens out behind a board on the next aisle down. On it: one serial, six documents, four counters and a date in 2031. The sealed drawing does not leave, it goes quiet on the wall and comes back as line one of the register. Line five is a work order that was held, and the reason on it is the amber lamp from four beats ago: line 1's lid station faulted, so the housing went to QA hold, so the manufacturing certificate on line six could not be issued until it cleared. That is the whole argument of a system of record -- a fault on a floor is a document somewhere else, and the document is what is left. iERP takes the parts, the people and the paperwork a plant already generates and returns the system around them: procurement, inventory, production, quality, assets, and the warranty that outlives the build.
Open iERP
The vehicle
The car in this scene is CarConcept from the Khronos glTF Sample Assets, used under CC BY 4.0. Model and textures by Eric Chadwick of Darmstadt Graphics Group GmbH, 2024. Khronos Group logos appear on the model and remain Khronos trademarks, excluded from that licence. The file is recompressed for the web -- meshopt geometry compression and quantization, about half the published size -- and is otherwise unchanged; the car is taken apart here at runtime, not in the file. Full licence.