The Tough Tech problem we are solving
Heavy machinery moves our world. It lifts the steel for our buildings. It carves roads out of mountains. It plants and harvests our foods. It is powerful, durable, and ubiquitous. While there is tremendous diversity of scale and application within the heavy machinery industry, the lifeblood of the vast majority of these machines is diesel fuel, which, in turn, is needed to run complex and power intensive hydraulic systems. Though relatively long lasting and capable of brute force, these platforms lack fine control and produce 22 lbs of CO2 per gallon of diesel, resulting in 55,000,000 tons of CO2 annually.
The demand for electrically powered heavy machines is rapidly increasing. The industry is already seeing electric and hybrid retrofits of existing hydraulic platforms. But these conversions are grossly inefficient and significantly more expensive than their diesel counterparts. The batteries required to run the current hydraulic systems of heavy machinery are massive, unwieldy, and offer less runtime than the status quo. Some warehouse-scale machinery like forklifts are transitioning to alternative fuels such as hydrogen in an effort to be more sustainable. All of these solutions have shortcomings. The reason? They rely on an intrinsically inefficient system — hydraulics.
About our solution
RISE Robotics has invented a replacement for hydraulic systems that will enable the next era of fully electrified heavy machinery — one that is at once sustainable, robust, and precise. The startup’s core technology is an electrically-powered mechanical linear actuator with all the abilities of a hydraulic cylinder but vastly improved efficiency and control. RISE also supplies electrification systems through partnerships with heavy machinery OEMs, helping maximize the impact of its hardware.