The partnership will see engineering teams from the two companies aim to turn the current prototype into a machine ready for shopfloor use, with interest already coming from companies in the automotive, aerospace, construction, medical and renewables sectors.
Design for manufacture and supply chain management will be the first tasks, whilst experts from Applied Automation will create a dedicated assembly line and testing area at its facility in Plymouth to help meet the target of an early 2026 release.
This new technology is expected to generate over £5m of revenue from first year sales and could create up to ten jobs across the two firms.
“We are fantastic at innovating and developing new technology that is changing the way companies adopt additive manufacturing,” Martin Jewell, Chief Technical Officer of Rapid Fusion, said in a statement. “However, we are not set-up to manufacture the solutions we create in low to medium volumes, which is where our relationship with Applied Automation really comes into its own. Our initial robot systems – Apollo and Zeus – have been developed in partnership so it made perfect sense to give Paul [Paul Rowe, Director of Applied Automation] and his team the opportunity to build Medusa.
“The aim is to take some of the early production costs out of the equation by streamlining design for manufacture and then developing an assembly line that will take just six weeks – from start to finish – to build each model. This gives us a great opportunity to be first to market and live on shopfloors by March 2026.”
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Backed by a £1.2m grant from Innovate UK, Medusa is said to be three times faster than conventional machines, twice as accurate and promises to reduce training and maintenance costs by 30 per cent.
The gantry-style machine combines pellet extruder, filament and a CNC machining tool to provide a single-source solution for large moulds and tooling typically used by aerospace, automotive, marine and construction companies.
Latest AI and Siemens motion control technologies have been integrated into the design, with the system boasting a 1.2m3 volume build and able to move at 1200mm per second speeds.
“The facility in Plymouth is packed full of equipment and over 200 control system experts, toolmakers and manufacturing professionals that all work together to help bring the outsourcing process to life for customers,” Rowe added.
“For Martin and his team, we will take on most of the build, final assembly and testing. The aim is to have two pre-production machines ready in the next few months to help fine-tune the process, followed by the first commercial systems to be ready in the first quarter of 2026.”
