Mission Context
Forward operating bases (FOBs) and temporary installations still rely heavily on:
Manual construction of barriers, shelters, and revetments
Labor‑intensive handling of pallets, ammunition crates, water, and humanitarian supplies
Slow adaptation to changing terrain and threat environments
This leads to high personnel risk (construction under threat), long setup times, and heavy logistics tails for prefabricated structures.
Objective:
Design and deploy an expeditionary robotic construction and logistics cell that can:
3D print critical structures on‑site using local/indigenous materials
Automate bulk material handling, palletizing, and depalletizing inside the base
Operate with minimal personnel in contested or austere environments
Be managed and documented through a Private LLM for planning, training, and troubleshooting
Combined Capabilities:
Mekifi + Autocon
Mekifi Engineering & Automation
- Designs and integrates robotic cells, palletizing systems, conveyors, and safety‑rated control architectures for industrial environments
- Proven track record in turning multi‑line, labor‑intensive operations into single‑robot, high‑throughput cells with custom end‑of‑arm tooling and integrated safety systems
- Experience delivering mission‑critical mechanization for repetitive, fatiguing, and high‑risk tasks in manufacturing
AUTOCON Technologies
- Provides the Mobile Robotic System (MRS): a construction‑scale platform with a 55‑foot robotic arm for on‑site 3D printing of buildings and structures
- MRS offers autonomous navigation over minimally prepared terrain and adapts to different construction environments
- Autonomy & Planning Software Suite supports real‑time mission planning, deep‑learning‑based surface modeling, explicit slicing, and TerraSlab mesh recognition for unmanned construction operations
- Materials toolkit covers polymers, thermoplastics, cementitious and metal composites, and indigenous composites, explicitly positioned for expeditionary environments using local materials for low‑resource manufacturing
Combined, this enables a solution where AUTOCON’s MRS becomes the expeditionary construction platform, and Mekifi engineers the logistics automation layer and base‑internal robotics, then wraps it in an integrated controls and safety stack.