Envelope
Lower ceilings
No clearance for human movement or overhead safety means less volume to build, heat and cool.
What does a factory cost when nobody has to breathe in it?
Every robot ROI calculator prices the robots. None price the building. When a plant is designed from scratch for machines — with no continuous human presence — ceiling height, HVAC, lighting and ventilation stop being driven by human comfort. This tool estimates what that saves. Honestly, with sources.
30–40%
of an industrial building’s energy is climate control
80–150 €/m²
typical HVAC install cost you can rethink
30 days
FANUC runs unattended, in the dark
The uncovered angle
Labor is the wrong thing to substitute.
The market is saturated with tools comparing human wages against a robot’s total cost of ownership. That argument only holds during human–machine coexistence. A true dark factory, designed for robots from day one, removes an entire category of cost that no public calculator models: the envelope built and conditioned for people.
HVAC
Right-sized climate
Human thermal comfort — not process tolerance — usually drives plant sizing. Remove the people, shrink the system.
30–40% of total energyLighting
Lights out, literally
LIDAR, ToF, IR and structured-light vision don’t need ambient visible light. General lighting drops toward zero.
Ventilation
Process, not lungs
The per-person air component (ASHRAE 62.1 Rp) disappears. Only the material/process component stays.
The constraint we don’t hide
It is a strong reduction, never zero.
Electronics and batteries still need thermoregulation. Li-ion packs want 15–35 °C; industrial PLCs tolerate a much wider band than people do. So the saving is on ambient climate control of the whole volume, replaced by targeted conditioning of cabinets and battery packs. A tool that pretends this cost vanishes would be dismantled by any facility engineer — so this one models two thermal bands, not one.
Proven, not theoretical
FANUC has done this for 20+ years.
Oshino / Yamanashi, Japan
FANUC’s lights-out complex has run production without human presence for up to a month at a time, across roughly two dozen factories. It is the standing proof that the concept is buildable — and that, in the dark, lighting and HVAC can be cut to a minimum or switched off entirely.
~6,000robots produced per month
30 dayscontinuous unattended operation
~22factories in the complex
Estimate your envelope
Put your floor area in. Get an honest number out.
Deterministic formulas, every constant traceable to a cited source. No AI-invented figures.
A marketing/visibility tool for order-of-magnitude estimates — not a substitute for a proper engineering study, HVAC load calculation, or quantity survey.