A discussion with Russel Varone at Diamond Age robotics
In 2018, Russell Varone (former General Assembly Director for Tesla) and Jack Oslan (a Silicon Valley technology founder) linked up to co-found Diamond Age, a factory-in-the-field robotics company with the ambitious goal of solving big issues in construction, including the labor shortage and the need for more attainable housing.
We recently spoke with Varone to learn more about what Diamond Age is doing and what they hope to accomplish.
Q: What’s the actual, physical process of what you do?
It’s pretty close to a traditional build. We use a slab contractor to form and pour the slab, then we use ground penetrating radar to look through the slab [for anything that would be in the way] before drilling into it for vertical post-tensioning.
Then we start our first layer, which is like laying out the bottom plate on a house.
Q: Tell us about your on-site factory.
The whole machine sits outside of the house. We basically create a space frame [on six vertical columns]. We compact the earth under the columns to hold the machine’s weight. We orient the columns very accurately — it’s a laser-driven measurement down to fractions of a millimeter. Then we get them all plumb, true and level.
On those six columns we lay two runways. These are 100-foot-long aluminum beams. Then we put two bridges across them.
One bridge we call the main bridge; that’s a double beam that will hold 4,000 pounds of load. The second beam is lighter weight. We call it a fly bridge. It’s a single beam that holds our underhung six-axis robot — an articulating arm. There are two robotic manipulators on one machine, which can have different functionalities, but also work together.
Our machine looks a bit like the cranes that unload ships at the port, but there’s a lot of automation on it, so it’s considered a robot.
Q: How does the extrusion process work?
The entire house is extruded, including both the interior and exterior walls. We call it a composite wall system — a concrete and foam sandwich. The foam serves as insulation and as a bonding agent; it’s a structural member of the wall system.
The main bridge does the extrusion. We push concrete out under pressure. We’ll start at the back of the house and squeeze out a two-and-a-half-inch square profile of concrete all the way down the long side of the house.
Then, we’ll do a bedroom, and the machine will turn itself 90 degrees, squeeze out that 12 feet, turn 90 degrees, do four feet to the porch. And it lays out a house in a sequential form, all the inner and outer wall sections. [This process is repeated multiple times for the interior and exterior wall surfaces, leaving a gap between them for the foam.]
Since we have cables anchored into the slab, we thread them up through the wall, in vinyl sleeves, before we foam. Then we thread that cable through the top plate and pull tension — about 7,000 pounds of force. That locks down the cable and squeezes the whole assembly to the slab.
Q: What labor is on the site?
Our intention is to become a super sub, able to go from dirt to front door keys. Right now, my MEP labor is on-site, but we’re bringing some of that in-house and will eventually also control HVAC and roofing.
Q: How many homes can you build at one time?
At our Mountain View project with Century Communities in Casa Grande, Arizona, we have six houses in progress. Two are completed and, for one of them, we are just waiting on septic permits. Two homes are in their manual finishing phase and another two are in the active stages of the robotic build.
When a house is done, we pick the machine apart piece by piece with a crane. Then we can put the machine across the street, or at the house next door.
We’re right around a 60-day build. For the first community we built, which was four houses on mixed lots, we set up the machine on June 6, 2022 and we got a certificate of occupancy on August 10. On this second community, we have 43 lots to build on and we brought one house in at about 58 days.
Q: Where did your machinery and funding come from?
We built a lot of the machinery initially. When we first invested in this, Jack and I put up private money. We built a bunch of cobbled together, small-scale machines the size of a one-car garage.
Then we got to a prototype stage. We proved that we could write the software, that could control the concrete and that we could use this machine for secondary operations. That’s when we shopped it.
We got our first funding in December 2020, raising about $8 million from venture capital, and some from family offices and high net-worth individuals. We raised $50 million in our A round in December 2021. Now we’re out in our B round and we’re potentially going to raise up to $150 million to scale and grow the company.
Q: What have you learned as you’ve worked through this?
The houses we build look just like traditional three-bed, two-bath stucco homes. That familiarity is important to my customer (the homebuilder), to their customer (the homebuyer) and to regulators.
When we submit plans to get our building permit, they see all of our details. We have very extensive build packages. The planning and permits departments and building inspectors are familiar with the product because most of them have dealt with concrete, CMUs and block walls.
Q: How much education do you do?
We show up six to nine months early. I stand in front of city councils, talk to mayors, to directors of planning offices, to fire marshals. We educate everybody.
We teach [builders and regulators] about how we’re an amalgam of three different systems — post-tensioning, composite panels (like ICFs or SIPs) and dry stack masonry — and show them what we take from each.
All that gets professional engineering stamps. We also do the building calculations, the seismic testing, the wind load and in-plane and out-of-plane shear testing and load bearing. And we’ve done all of that testing to come up with a suite of engineering values that we build the house to.
We overbuild the house. We do a three-part ceiling system for water intrusion. If we have concrete touching wood, we either put in an insulated sheet of foam or we use pressure-treated lumber. We follow all the rules of construction and we don’t get any special exceptions because we’re weird.
Q: And labor? What are your challenges there?
Hiring’s been pretty good. We have over 150 employees, half of them in the field and half in engineering and support.
About a third of our people are from the construction trades. But [I don’t want to] cannibalize the trades because [other builders] would lose that person. About 25% of our staff is military veterans.
I’m trying to bring in as many non-construction people as possible. The machine operators, the people who feed the machine and monitor it, some of those folks come out of fast food. We train for the task. I’ll teach you how to mix concrete and load it with the machine. I’ll teach you how to hook up a machine that does insulation. Our focus is task-based, not trade based.
Q: What is the workday like and how many people are on-site?
We run 12-hour daytime shifts, but we can run in the dark. The machines are lit and we have cameras everywhere. And I know from the data that we’re quiet enough to be able to operate overnight. I just have to work with the local municipalities and get an outside operating hours permit. We’re training up for multiple shifts on multiple sites.
On a typical site you will see a supervisor, two maintenance techs and probably five machine operators that we call “industrial athletes.” To run one machine, you need anywhere from four to seven people depending on the operation. If it’s a heavy operation like concrete, you need six or seven. If you’re spraying stucco, you need two.
Q: How does weather affect operations?
You can do concrete in light rain, but heavy rain will start to wash the Portland cement out. For heavy rain, we’re in the process of engineering a kind of weather shell. Then it’s just a matter of wind loads. The ultimate stop for us is lightning since we’re using an all-metal machine that’s 30 feet tall.
At the end of the workday, the machines are shut down and sit outside like a tractor. We have some stuff that protects the sensitive parts against water or dust.
Q: Lots of people are getting into 3D printing. What makes you different?
A lot of people see 3D printing as a solution looking for a problem; that is, I have a machine that can do a thing. We look at this another way. We have a house we need to build. How do we apply automation to replace labor? That’s our startup thesis from the ground up: automation needs to replace the labor that’s not available.
[Our potential really goes beyond concrete.] We’ve put a big automation platform out in the field. If someone wants me to extrude a bio foam, I will extrude a bio foam. If someone wants me to pick up mud and shape it like bricks, I can do that with a machine. If someone wants me to extrude concrete like Play-Doh, I can do that also.
We’re agnostic to the task. The robot is a controlled motion system. It goes where you want, how you want, when you want. We put tooling on the end of that to say, here, I need to cut a window in this wall. I need to roll a roof truss onto this. We’ve built a system that has multi-functionality.
Q: Who is your competition?
They’re offsite builders: panelized, modular, as well as others who are using robots. I see them as rivals, not as a competition where I have to win, and they have to lose. We’re all trying to solve a different problem. I respect what they do. I have an abundance mentality. Everybody can be successful.
In this country, we’re four to five million houses short in the entry-level market and that hole gets deeper by a couple thousand houses every year. When the backlog is down to only half a million houses and we build many thousands of houses a year, maybe then we’ll be competitors.
