Take me a little bit through the advantages of prefab rebar. When and how is it cost-effective? What are some of the benefits of manufacturing rebar offsite in a controlled factory environment?

Our customers struggle with managing the cost of labor onsite and offsite for fabricating and assembling rebar. If you’re a concrete company, GC or developer with a workforce installing rebar, you know this challenge. What we are doing at Toggle is introducing new tools in a factory environment that allows the same workforce to produce more tonnage every shift ,in a much safer and more controlled environment, ultimately finishing projects faster and allowing for more projects to get done. By allowing industrial robots to do some of the literal heavy lifting, our customers can either get more reinforcement done in the same amount of time or deploy their workforce to other tasks or more parallel projects. Either way, the result is higher productivity—not to mention safety, speed and accuracy.

Can you tell me a bit about the technology involved in the robots building the concrete?

We use industrial robots for what they’re best at—lifting heavy components and specialized tools and placing them into very specific locations over and over again without giving up speed or accuracy. Where our technology comes in is enabling this system to be flexible for use in a construction context. With traditional manufacturing, you’re typically doing the same task and making the same product or set of products repetitively. In construction you need to be able to do nearly infinite variations. Different buildings and different site conditions require different shapes, sizes and variations on those shapes and sizes. So, what our technology does—software for robotic path planning and data processing; hardware for fixturing the assembly; and process for cooperating between people and machines—is enabling rapid switching from one shape and size to the next and one project to the next. No matter how standardized construction may become, it will always require variety.

How do you see Toggle evolving and advancing over the next few years? Are there other construction solutions you’d like to expand into?

Given how important rebar and reinforced concrete is for urban and infrastructure construction, we want to focus on this area and eventually be able to participate globally as a key contributor to the most important shared public systems across categories like transportation, energy, water, housing and others. We definitely see our technology as a platform to enable all different kinds of construction scale assembly, and we plan to both move out of the factory to bring our technology to the site, as well as branch into additional categories like precast.