



This could be natural stone marble quarried from Carrera Italy to body porcelain fired in a kiln in Arkansas,” says Acworth. These tiles all have different characteristics, from differences in finish and smoothness to the textures and striations that you see in stone or the iridescence of something like pearl. All told, Artaic handles about 7,000 different SKUs of tile, which seems like a lot until you start dividing them up by material, size, finish and color. (Artaic has six main lines that run in about 100 colors each, with two sizes and three finishes. Special tiles and other exceptions make up the rest.)

To tell the robot what to do, they created command line software that converted a design file into XML that the robot would understand. To help clients accurately envision what their order will look like, Acworth needed software that will accurately render a preview. To do that, Artaic has painstakingly built up a digital library of all the tiles it uses. When new tiles are added to the repertoire, they are carefully photographed — several tiles per color if it has veins or other complex textures — and added to the palettes.

“It’s like a throwback to the days of 256 web safe colors and DeBabelizer,” says Reiss. Except some pixels are twice as expensive as others and on back order for eight weeks.

It’s managing the inventory rather than the robot that Acworth says is Artaic’s secret sauce. Because each project is generally a one-off, it doesn’t suit them well to store bulk materials. They don’t know what they need until the order is finalized. Even with their lean approach, Acworth estimates that they have about 7-8 tonnes of tile on site at any given time, just for samples and rush jobs. So the design software needs to know what tile is available and how long it will take to get what they don’t have on hand.

Every tile as a supply story with it, says Acworth. “It’s kind of ridiculous how much data we connect on each and every SKU.” Reiss begins listing off the stats. “Product data, pricing, lead time, geometric information.” Acworth takes up the list. “How much we have. Here’s how long to get in by truck and the price. How much to get it by sea, how much to get in by air, and there are the blackout dates. All that is codified.”

Acworth’s goal is to have it so seamlessly integrated that salespeople on the road can adjust orders on the fly, perhaps replacing one kind of red tile with another one that’s close enough and might shave months of time or thousands of dollars off the final price, and then re-rendering it, like a version of Photoshop that instead of optimizing for file size, optimizes for shipping dates.

Because the robot is so fast, getting the tile usually takes longer than making the project. “We give them a three week lead time, and little do they know that two of those weeks are waiting for the tile to arrive,” says Acworth. Once they have all the supplies, the robot arm can build a mosaic about ten times faster than seasoned professionals can — but Acworth says that he’s building an entirely new robot that will drastically increase assembly speed, forecasted to build 16 times faster than the current machine.

Once the tile are in Artaic’s facilties, Acworth’s final challenge is keeping the robot fed. This turns out to be really hard. “Robots love structured things where everything is the same shape every time,” he says. “In a car factory the car body is exactly the same dimensions to a millimeter or two.” Tiles, on the other hand, are a tiny commodity product which have a huge variation in shape. On a quarter inch tile, a variation of a few millimeters means +/- 30% variation from nominal. Tiles can be chipped, or little bits of flashing can leak past the edge of the mold.

His first line of defense is by training their suppliers to meet Artaic’s needs. “They’re not used to people using a robot to assemble tiles,” says Acworth, “so we have to work with them to help them understand our process.” Subjecting shipments from any new supplier to digital image processing and photo spectrometry to ensure they are within the tolerances that Artaic needs. Inevitably, the first batch never is.

“Each one gets a very polite email with pictures and graphs,” says Acworth showing how the tiles they sent were outside the specifications. It’s partially a show of force. “By showing them scientific analysis we scare the crap out of them and from then on we get premium product because they know we’re serious.”

It’s all part of Acworth’s dream of world mosaic domination. If they can keep bringing the costs down, mosaics will become affordable not only for large casinos and mega hotels, but for regular consumers as well. Artaic has already experimented with making their product available in a retail store, with design software allowing DIY patterns, leading to an Ikea-like kit with pre-placed tiles and bottles of grout shipped to your door.

“Italy has been in the leader in mosaics for 3,000 years,” says Reiss, “Then there was a fifteen year window when labor went to India and China. Now we want to bring it to the US for the next 3,000 years.”

“We’re an art company on the outside and a tech company on the inside,” says Acworth. “Our customers come to us for art and service. Under the hood it’s these technologies that we’re developing every day that make us good at that.”