Carlo Ratti

A new startup co-founded by Carlo Ratti says it could reduce waste in the manufacturing process of cross-laminated timber (CLT) by up to 30 percent using AI tech. Carlo Ratti, who is the founder of Carlo Ratti Associati and a professor at MIT, has launched a new startup called Maestro in collaboration with Mykola Murashko, a Cambridge graduate, to pursue the research, which it calls AI Timber. The basic idea is that instead of reducing irregular trees into uniform straight lines and therefore producing significant waste wood, AI Timber maintains the varied shapes of the trees. It uses a combination of AI and digital machining tools to first scan a set of raw timber logs. The logs are then flat sawed into irregular boards, suiting the size of the wood. From there, software is used to identify the ideal sequence to fit them together, like a puzzle piece, resulting in less overall waste.