Wide-Ownership Workshop Industrial Ecology Summary

Vision: to encapsulate a manufacturing base in a minimum investment, to make factories that can
economically produce factories and almost any other product, to create automated market-based
mechanisms to run such a factory complex, routing tooling and partially finished work among a
network of hundreds or thousands of owners of co-located equipment bought with equipment-
secured loans, so to distribute the profits of real capital and sustain demand, while also eliminating the
succession of profits, marketing and tax markup of middlemen.

This vision can be broken into separate corporate functions:

• advanced actuators and motion control,
• adaptable manufacturing equipment,
• integrated manufacturing software,
• management of factories of co-located independently owned machines,
• machine-secured lending,
• coordinating holding company for these
and
• non-profit foundation for open designs, testing, valuation and compensation

These can largely be pursued in parallel given high investment, as well as forming a natural sequence
for a self-financing path.

Motivation:
Each business has an incentive to pay as little as possible in wages, which today is becoming more and
more possible through automation, but when everybody does this, demand dries up because fewer
people have enough money to buy. The challenge is to not only make things people want, but also to
have an economic environment in which they are paid enough to buy to buy the things made.

The most direct possible solution is to have the productivity of machines be directly owned by those
who would otherwise be factory workers or passive investors.

Have the machines located together in a factory in a district of factories, but have each machine
owned by a single person (or small partnership for expensive machines), with a low, soft limit on the
variation in total value of machines one person can economically own, using contract terms, insurance
rates and so forth so that, for instance, 95% of owners (who would otherwise be factory workers) each
own between $200K and $800K worth of machines, or enough to pay the equivalent of a middle- to
upper-middle- class income from the machines' productivity, perhaps supplemented by machine-
tending and repair work for those on the lower end of the capital range.

Owners buy these machines with low-interest rate loans secured by the machines themselves. This
gives an outlet for banks to make low-risk, productive loans. This makes it effectively possible to print
qualified borrowers, and gives a path out of the solvency and liquidity crisis behind today's economic
malaise. Government guarantees would sweeten the deal, or direct government or central bank
lending would have lower overhead.

© Enon Harris 2016

Owners swap time on their machines with owners of other machines, or borrow or lend machine time
or rent time on other machines in the factory complex, giving each owner access to many specialized
tools, effectively multiplying their capital. While ownership would be restricted, renting and leasing
would not, so large-scale manufacturing with low requirements for capital investment would be
encouraged. A single owner retaining title through all steps from raw materials to finished parts,
through assembly and testing will be able to make a finished good with no succession of profits,
overhead, marketing, taxes that ordinarily makes goods cost the consumer at least three times as
much as the cost of materials and machine time.

There are also potential tax and regulatory advantages to this form of organization. Owners can
deduct the depreciation of the machines from their taxes, and when fully depreciated, they can sell the
machine to another owner, buy a new or used machine with the proceeds, then depreciate their
“new” machine all over again. The paper depreciation reduces the effective tax rate a great deal, while
the actual value of the machinery declines by an amount orders of magnitude smaller than the value of
the products it produces over the same period. If those products are for the owner's personal use,
there is no income tax on the value added. In countries with VAT, it is paid only on the materials, not
the finished product.

Machine time-swaps and loans valued in notional hours give a parallel monetary system inside the
factory, particularly if the loans to buy machines and the fees to insure, house and operate them are
payable in machine-hours. Depending on technicalities, this may allow deferring the realization of cash-
value capital gains, and avoiding repeated taxes on the phantom gains caused by inflation, which can
reduce after-tax wealth by an order of magnitude over a few decades.

Having the production network be composed of small entities means that they are not subject to
most of the burdensome and counterproductive reporting and regulatory requirements that apply to
larger firms, while still being subject to the requirements of the large entity (possibly a co-op) that
leases out space in the factory, to the standardized contract terms for time swaps etc. Being applied so
much closer to the facts of individual cases, applying better judgment is possible than is the case with
today's sprawling, conflicting and incomprehensible thickets of regulations.

This is all enabled by software that handles everything: part routing, tool movements, documentation,
assembly, testing, and even co-evolves part designs with the manufacturing processes required to
make each part to achieve maximum part quality and production efficiency. This software uses
advanced techniques such as Geometric Algebra, machine learning, agent-based market simulations,
compressed sensing, sensor fusion and other proven but underused methods to allow using a factory
like a computer to produce almost any product – even including new factories – by running a pre-
written, cheaply available program, which may be modified to taste, combined with other designs and
improved upon – with painless and transparent payment for producing designs others find useful.

The advantages in efficiency, sustainable growth, and social benefits are obvious, as is the potential to
transform the economy into a better one, increase independence, national and individual security and
apply some of the backlog of yet-unused technological advances to improving life.

© Enon Harris 2016

 Actuway Business Plan:
(integrated motion control systems);

And later: Formatrix (runs factories that are co-located markets of automated semi-
independent shops); Remanyou (recycles components of machines and durable goods for
use in various applications; re-manufactures goods) Psi-Star (Ψ*) Holdings (holding
company, “one ring to rule them all”, owns small bits of many affiliates, stock is widely
owned, control concentrated), Psi-Star Finance (production-equipment secured lender) ;
Seed Factory Foundation ( non-profit intellectual property holder and trade and standards
organization for the affiliate network).

Strategy: to get early profitability through initially specializing in the niche market with the
widest potential productive applications, extending that market with easier, cheaper and
better products marketed for their style, engineering and service and sold online directly to
customers, then to expand into the applications of our products in a strategic sequence
which creates macro demand together with production capacity.

The common element in emerging production automation such as robots, CNC, 3D printing is
controlled actuators. These in turn require certain position and other sensors to allow control, as
well as electronics to control the actuators. These position encoders and motor controllers are
relatively high profit items that can be made economically with low capital investment. When
integrated with commodity or custom motors, together these form motion control systems that
can be applied in all sorts of factory and other machines.

Closed-loop control, that is, knowing where the actuator is from observation of a position
sensor/encoder rather than just deducing its position from where the system told it to go, allows
tools to be lighter and less structurally stiff for a given precision of positioning or to be more
precise than open-loop tools with similar mass. Closing the loop even more fully by directly
observing the effects of the tool on the work allows adaptive, intelligent automation focused on
the results achieved rather than just the sequence of tool movements, allowing creativity and
economy in design and manufacturing.

Sensor fusion using position encoders, accelerometers (doubling as vibration sensors),

gyroscopes, strain gauges, and electromagnetic sensors (low RF, ambient electrometer, capacitive
proximity, magnetometer) in each actuator networked together, supplemented with structured
light, video and other networked sensors – all processed to update a unified world, tool and
workpiece model.

Currently integrated motion control packages are more expensive and difficult to use than they
need to be. There is a much larger market available for affordable, capable, reliable, and easily
applied products than is currently being served, and it is growing rapidly with broadening
popularity of automated machinery for homes and small shops, servos in UAVs and RC aircraft, as
well as the accelerating expansion of commercial use of CNC tools, robots and robotic actuators. A

© Enon Harris 2016

company that serves all those unmet needs - affordable, capable, reliable, and easily applied
actuator packages - will have a large market almost to itself.

The market will be further enhanced by making these actuator / sensor / electronic / software
packages user-repairable and durable using open and modular designs, comprehensive
documentation, integrated self-testing, guaranteed-availability minimum-cost spare parts and
companion affordable and rentable standard smart automated diagnostic instrument(s). By
making the elements reusable, with a high retained resale value, the effective cost of using these
actuators is reduced by the present value of the future resale value. Tax depreciation deductions
may outpace actual depreciation, giving further profit to the customer and thus increasing sales.

Going from actuators to robots and machine tools is natural – compared to the active parts of the
machine, the structural elements needed are easy to produce but add a great deal of value. A
middle ground between simple actuators and full machines is also an untapped market – advanced
integrated actuators with features such as continuously variable transmissions, two or three
degrees of freedom of motion, liquid cooling, integrated sensors and controllers, variable
stiffness/ clutches, adjustable static force bias/spring, regenerative energy reclamation and other
lab-demonstrated technologies may be manufacturable for about what quality gear-motors cost
today.

Software for motion control is another technology that is a key part of the value in the firms'
packages. Allowing both a high-level visual interface for goal-directed motion planning of systems
with many actuators as well as well-documented programming access to the details underneath
when needed, the software will be easy to use for any purpose. Not only motion control and path
planning but also sensor fusion of visual, mechanical and other spatial sensors have their ideal
armature in an advanced mathematical technique, conformal Clifford Algebra, also called
Conformal Geometric Algebra, which eliminates the ad-hoc hacks in representing mechanical
systems that have formerly made motion control software limited and difficult to use. This new
software will be designed to be extended to simulation of manufacturing processes, optimizing
designs for manufacturing and automation of production engineering.

Reconfigurable and programmable factory transport systems including automated material ,

product and tooling handling directed by advanced job management and accounting software and
tooling made more lightweight by automatically reconfigurable jigs round out the base
technology of Actuway Inc..

This then leads to automation of the complete production cycle and “Seed Factories”.

© Enon Harris 2016

Seed Factories
Seed factories are factories with small, general-purpose toolsets which can produce most of the
equipment for both special-purpose conventional factories and for more sophisticated general-
purpose factories. Using a small, highly-automated shop with general-purpose tools to build more
specialized tools to make a full factory, then expanding into a partially co-located / partially
distributed network of semi-independent production shops and factories, the Seed Factory
system gradually vertically integrates its suppliers' capabilities into its network.

In the Seed Factory system, rather than a monolithic corporation owning the machines, instead
shops and departments are their own separate entities, which lease machines from
worker/owners or small partnerships who buy machines on credit secured by the machines. The
credit may be from outside or from an affiliated finance company. The shops partially own, and are
partially owned by, one or more holding corporation(s). Affiliated shops could also own interests
in each other directly. To produce complex products, time or other measures of use of different
machines etc. would be swapped between owners in usually non-taxable transactions on an
internal market.

For example, a person who owns part of one machine, the “affiliate”, would have a corresponding
share of the use of that machine, valued in hours (which actually may vary in their correspondence
to machine hours depending on demand).

When the affiliate decides he wants a product, he can make it himself. Using an open-source
design which also contains the instructions for its own manufacture, the affiliate can edit the
design, make whatever changes he wishes and get a custom product at a low price. (The design is
licensed for a small fee from the Seed Factory Foundation, which handles crediting royalties to
designers and other contributors.)

Through automated software which creates an internal market, the affiliate swaps the hours on
his machine for hours on several other machines, schedules when he will use those machines, and
buys materials, usually from a co-located wholesale-buying club's warehouse which carries
everything from sheet metal to microcontrollers. The raw materials to produce the product are
owned by the affiliate, as is the right to use all the equipment needed to manufacture it. Any
additional labor the affiliate needs along the way is handled by direct personal contracting
facilitated by the same automated software using standardized contract terms. (Other affiliates
will earn money or machine hours through such contracts.)

There is no succession of taxes and multiplication of profits, overhead, shipping, storing and
marketing charges for each step of production and distribution as there is in conventional
distribution. Both production and direction of production are thus distributed, bottom-up and
market-optimized.

As the system grows, positive network effects emerge from owners having access to greater
numbers of specialized tools. Since outside customers pay more for production than owners, this
would encourage Seed Factory investment from customers wishing to gain the price advantages

© Enon Harris 2016

of participating in the internal market. The small size of owner entities and many shops exempts
them from a vast amount of burdensome regulation and also limits the size of business failures .

To keep the market efficient, without tending to monopoly or monopsony, mechanisms are
needed to restrict over-concentration of ownership of the machinery itself and to ensure that
each owner has multiple potential customers / lessors, while at the same time encouraging
production at all scales from prototyping to multimillion-unit runs. One possible approach is to
have standard charter language for member businesses requiring 51% ownership and control of
every individual machine up to ~$1M to be by an individual or a single small (<~5 person)
partnership, and restricting any individual or corporation's ownership share of capital equipment
(as opposed to leasing for use) to perhaps four times the median share would help ensure both
owners' independence and the goal of broad distribution of capital profits, while at the same time
allowing large-scale manufacturing with leased equipment and thus low capital requirements. Exact
limits could be different, but some limit on ownership concentration of the machinery itself is
needed to maintain the character of the network as a market of equals and the system's goal of
supporting consumer spending via owner income as an alternative or supplement to labor wages.
Restrictions on total loans by affiliated finance companies and on insurance coverage for machines
could achieve much the same effect in a less direct way, and could be soft limits in the form of
higher rates for more concentrated risks. Non-controlling indirect ownership and ownership of the
holding companies and their machine-leasing shop affiliates could have much looser limits, but
other ways of getting around the productive capital ownership concentration limit's intent will
need to be discouraged to maintain the broad capital income pattern underpinning market
demand.

Another important aspect of the seed factory system plan is its handling of intellectual property,
rewarding innovation and development sufficiently to accumulate a capital stock of designs and
documentation while encouraging the use of that information capital by offering reasonable and
predictable fees and terms. Design cost would be a low and constant percentage of production
cost, just enough to encourage designing and low enough to encourage use, adaptation and reuse
of designs.

The design will typically be licensed through the non-profit Seed Factory Foundation, which
handles valuation and payment for the use, documentation and testing of designs and all their
components, allowing competent designers to make a living and great designers to become
prosperous, while at the same time socializing these costs in order to prevent artificial scarcity of
design information, which has zero marginal cost to reproduce. Anything approaching a rational
payment system also avoids the free software community's problem of not creating integrated,
tested, reliable, well-documented and easy-to repair solutions but instead thousands of
amateurish, cryptic and obtuse tools. Good design, testing and documentation takes talent, taste
and time which in turn takes money. On the other hand, building on others' designs will be
encouraged, paying all contributors according to the ongoing contributions of their past
innovations and utility, but the SFF limits costs to users to a percentage of estimated physical
production costs – which might be as high as 50% for the most experimental and specialized gear
or 5% for a common household item, but overall will average about 20% of the production costs of

© Enon Harris 2016

a finished product. The SFF will also acquire licenses and patents for defensive purposes, lobby for
helpful policies and litigate cases that could set precedents on issues important to seed factory
affiliates and customers. The valuation system will be complex, but will use ability and reputation-
weighted polling of users and designers as inputs to reduce bureaucratic overhead and limit bias in
valuation of design features. Unlicensed designs will be allowed, but using unique portions of a
SFF design without payment, (which should usually be detectable in the work-scheduling software
and network) will entail triple costs or even harsher penalties.

Another new type of factory made possible by modern technologies, which would even more
naturally be organized as a wide ownership workshop industrial ecology (WOWIE) is the
remanufactory, which takes in old machines and durable goods and disassembles, refurbishes and
re-purposes their parts, sometimes remanufacturing items, sometimes using parts as spares or for
other purposes entirely, as when designers specify or adapt old parts in new designs. The
problems with doing this in the past have been the excessive amount of skilled labor required, the
unavailability of information, and the many parts needed to repair such a vast number of different
products sold over the past few decades. On the other hand, there is less difficulty in building a
device from existing “junk” parts that need only minor modification than there is in
manufacturing all the parts from scratch.

Robotics and vision technologies are now capable of recognizing objects and features in many
cases, and most of the rest can be identified quickly and easily by humans, who often need not be
highly skilled and might be using the robot's camera from their home across town or from
thousands of miles away. It is possible to create a system to easily program robots by example. By
having the first example of any product model that has been brought in for tear-down be
disassembled using manual control of the robots, if the right information is collected at the time,
including eye-tracking of the operator, 3D surface sensing of the work, and voice notes of each
step, in most cases the robots will be able to perform the task steps autonomously, and occasional
brief human assistance when there is a problem would expand the capabilities of the program as it
learned by example how to handle that problem. This could be done without high-level AI capable
of generalizing about similar tasks, though such is likely possible. Computer and robotic systems
would automate the documentation, reverse-engineering, testing, storage and retrieval of parts,
as well as even providing the capability of identifying parts which could be adapted to other uses
and performing the necessary repairs and modifications.

Designing and prototyping products will become vastly easier and cheaper, moving to mass-
production will become painless and usually cheaper than China. Thousands and eventually
millions of people will gain a new way of earning a living, one that gives more dignity and security
than labor alone.

Capitalism will become possible for all, America will start making things again, and we'll all get rich.

© Enon Harris 2016

 Why to invest in the wide-ownership workshop industrial economy (WOWIE)
Large market
The class of goods that can be made profitably will be quite large.

High profit
Volume of goods produced is high. Goods include high value-added, income-producing items such as
machine tools.

High growth rate

The factories can largely reproduce themselves.

Productive use of capital

Unlike other investments, this is direct investment in manufacturing, making real products.

Positive externalities
Widely distributed ownership of machines by individuals and small partnerships which are then leased
to manufacturers distributes the rents from productive capital ownership, giving a market for the
products and stimulates the economy in general as well. Ease of prototyping and producing will lead to
widespread application of many new technologies and the expansion of the types of goods available.

Low risk
Productive capital in the form of flexible machines is the lowest-risk investment because it directly
creates value and has the rare capability of re-purposing itself as needed to meet changing demand;
other investments have more indirect and uncertain contributions to productivity.

Flexible investment structure

One can make products; buy (perhaps with machine-secured financing) a machine, then rent or lease it
to manufacturers; club with others in buying shares of each others' machines; or buy into the shop,
factory or production-network levels as well. Trading/swapping machine time will also be an active new
market. Issuing insurance and machine-secured loans will be profitable.

Low prices for investors on goods produced

Since one can order objects built automatically, buying materials at bulk prices and using machine time
on machines one often partially or totally owns, there is no succession of profits and taxes each time
the intermediate goods change hands. Prices are greatly reduced. Items for sale outside the network
would be priced higher, though still highly competitive in the market.

Tax advantages
On items made for personal use, one would only pay sales tax on the raw materials. The value-added in
items made for personal use would not be subject to income tax. Machine depreciation tax deductions
would be big and could be renewed by exchanging machines with other owners.

Being in at the beginning of a potential new industrial revolution

This is a new way of manufacturing which takes advantage of the huge backlog of advances in
technology which other manufacturers have been slow to adopt because of their prior investments in
competing methods. It uses novel forms of organization with less management overhead than
competitors, thus it is more competitive. It also solves the problem of distribution in an automated-
production economy by turning workers into owners and capitalists.

© Enon Harris 2016

 Notes on possible technical paths:
Product progression:

Encoders – miniature vernier capacitive plus direct angular velocity

Motor control software

Initially adapt others' motors, leading to greater fractions of custom parts, then total system.
Motors: coreless permanent magnet servos with up to several ft-lb torque, optional water cooling and
power and network signal pass-throughs
Actuators with pre-load, 1, 2 and 3 degrees of freedom, clutches, variable stiffness and variable
transmissions.
Precision leadscrew-based actuators

Integrated MC systems for:

robots,
machine tools,
factory transport systems,
reconfigurable jigs / tooling,
3-D printers and other production machinery

Sales of complete tools to manufacturers

First, best general tool: 6 DOF total, 5 DOF table (x,y, tilt, tip, twist), 1 DOF tool (z plunge), sealed
actuators , 5kW liquid-cooled spindle motor with variable transmission, 60cm (23.6 in) cube work
envelope, unlimited work length in feed-through, 25 micron (one-thousandth of an inch) work
tolerance results across envelope, 10 micron usually achievable, work-holding and reconfigurable jig
options, auto tool changing, self-calibration, work quality and tool wear monitoring, auto tool
grinding (tools as workpieces), various sensors including strain and vibration, retractable metrology
probe on spindle, flood coolant, sealed, cleanable enclosure, fittings for work and tool transport
connection. Additional types of tooling available. Inert gas and negative pressure options possible.

Next: Multipurpose tool tending, material-handling, cleaning, coating, welding, assembling and
packing arm and cart robots.

Simultaneously: English-wheel- based sheet-metal fabricator with integrated brake and shear
tools,perhaps drill and weld as well. (Makes compound-curved sheet metal parts such as auto and
aircraft bodies.)

Wire and small-tube space-frame fabricator integrating bending, shaped cutting and welding.

Controllable- bend direction aluminum extruder, and frame fabricator based on it .

Compound curved stressed-skin panel fabrication, with core a space frame or deep-drawn sheet

© Enon Harris 2016

form, made using punch, forge, or hydroforming giving a controlled 2-d curvature increment for each
cell of the pattern.

These give superior quality to current products at a fraction of the capital and greater productivity per
investment and per labor hour.

Integrated production engineering and scheduling software that allows using the co-located shop
network and worldwide factory sources like a personal computer, with both repeatable standards for
the average shopper and artistic flexibility in direction of production for the expert designer.

Integrated smart factories and co-located time-swapping shop networks with expanding libraries of
specialized tools and thin tooling for reconfigurable machines

Fair open design payment system encouraging use and creation of good designs and improvements.

Consumer goods:
mass-produced,
custom-commissioned and
“self-produced” by renting machine time and paying labor slices for an item that is part of a
batch that is sold before it is produced.

© Enon Harris 2016