Micro-factory Lahti

• 20 reinforced foundations in 4 days
• 3 foundation sizes printed on-site
• First operational Hyperion Micro-Factory

Peikko Group and Hyperion Robotics share a common goal of making construction faster, safer, and more environmentally friendly, so hosting Hyperion's first operational 3D printing Micro-Factory at Peikko's own headquarters site in Lahti was a natural fit. The pilot let Peikko see automated concrete printing technology in action on its home turf, producing real reinforced pad foundations rather than a lab demonstration.

For Hyperion Robotics, deploying the Micro-Factory at an established concrete-connections manufacturer like Peikko provided a credible, real-world testing ground for its industrial robots, patented hardware, and printing software. Running the deployment for two weeks let both companies open the site to city officials, university researchers, industry leaders, and investors, showcasing how automation can shorten lead times and improve safety and material efficiency in concrete construction.

Conventional formwork-based construction leaves foundation production tied to the pace of manual labor, so lead times stretch out whenever a project needs many similarly sized elements, like the pad foundations produced in the Lahti pilot. Every additional foundation means repeating the same formwork, rebar-placement, and pouring cycle, which limits how quickly a site can move from design to finished structure.

Material efficiency is another challenge with traditional methods, since formwork is generally built around standard shapes rather than a structure's actual load path, which tends to use more concrete and steel than an optimized design would require. On top of that, the manual handling of rebar, wet concrete, and heavy formwork panels on site carries real safety risk for construction crews, one of the reasons the industry has been looking to automation and robotics for safer alternatives.

Before automated 3D printing, reinforced concrete pad foundations like the ones produced during the Lahti pilot were typically built using cast-in-place or precast methods that rely on temporary formwork. Crews would construct wooden or steel formwork by hand, place and tie reinforcing steel inside it, then pour and cure the concrete before the formwork could be stripped and reused elsewhere.

That process is labor-intensive and time-consuming, and it commonly uses more material than a structure strictly needs, since formwork-based designs are typically simplified into standard shapes rather than optimized to the load path. Workers also spend significant time on-site handling rebar, wet concrete, and formwork panels, some of the more physically demanding and safety-sensitive tasks in construction.

During its two-week deployment at Peikko's Lahti headquarters, Hyperion Robotics' 260-square-meter Micro-Factory printed 20 fully reinforced concrete pad foundations across three different sizes in just four production days, demonstrating that automated 3D printing can turn around multiple structural elements far faster than a comparable formwork-based process. Because the system combines industrial robots with Hyperion's patented hardware and software, foundations can be produced with the same automation-driven precision project after project, rather than being rebuilt from scratch by hand each time.

The pilot's impact went beyond the foundations themselves. Opening the site to representatives from local cities, universities, and industry leaders, along with partners and investors, let Peikko and Hyperion demonstrate firsthand how automated concrete printing can shorten lead times while reducing the manual, safety-sensitive labor that traditional formwork construction requires. For Peikko, the collaboration reinforced its own commitment to faster, safer, and more sustainable ways to build, while giving Hyperion a real-world showcase for its Micro-Factory concept ahead of wider deployment.

Peikko Group, headquartered in Lahti, Finland since 1965, is a global supplier of concrete connection technology and reinforcement systems, operating in more than 30 countries. Hyperion Robotics is a construction-technology company that builds robotic 3D printing systems for concrete structures, aiming to make construction faster, safer, and more environmentally friendly through automation. The Lahti Micro-Factory pilot marked one of Hyperion's earliest demonstrations of an operational, on-site printing system rather than a fixed factory installation.