Research Progress
Siemens is building a swarm of robot spiders to 3D-print objects together
Post: 2016-05-01 13:42  View:2520

3D printing is still in its infancy, but it’s starting to show signs that it might revolutionize the way we manufacture products. That said, current technology won’t allow us to make anything larger than the printing machines themselves. Some smart people have suggested that we should look to nature to see how it builds things—specifically, spiders, and the way they can swarm together to build massive nests for themselves.

 

Siemens, the German engineering and telecommunications company, has taken this concept to heart. A team of researchers at its Princeton, New Jersey, laboratory are creating autonomous spider-like robots that can work together to 3D-print structures on command. While Siemens isn’t known for its robotics research, Livio Dalloro, the head of the company’s “Product Design, Simulation & Modeling Research” group in Princeton, said in an interview that the company views the bots as a “moonshot.” It hopes to entice researchers from across its hundreds of global offices to develop applications for the robots and create new products.

 

Dalloro comparing robots with a teammate.(Siemens Corporate Technology)

 

The eight-legged robots have a myriad of sensors that can perceive the world around them. They use a combination of a depth-perception camera (similar to Microsoft’s Kinect system) and an infrared laser scanner to “see” the world. Dalloro said the team at the lab have been working for a few years to design and simulate the software to figure out how the robots would move, and how they would work together, so that if one bot was working on building one section of an object, his teammate wouldn’t get in his way.

 

The team first concentrated on getting one robot to print something on a flat surface on its own, then print a small plastic object a few inches tall, using essentially the same plastic printing technology found in many consumer 3D printers. Now the team is working on using multiple robots to simultaneously build the same objects. Once the robots are able to work together, the researchers will focus on getting them to build larger objects.

 

Dalloro said the lab has two fully functioning robots, and a third that it’s using for testing. He said the lab plans to build at least three more soon as it scales up the bots’ ability to build collaboratively. “The idea is really to make these flexible autonomous, communicating, general purpose machines,” he said.

 

 

The team is also working on building with different materials. Currently, robots can only print out plastics—at about the same speeds that a traditional 3D printer would—but Dalloro said they’re researching other materials, such as concrete.

 

 

 
 
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Read more:http://qz.com/672708/siemens-is-building-a-swarm-of-robot-spiders-to-3d-print-objects-together/

 

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