Swarms of Robot Spiders Could Be the Future of 3D Printing
The problem with most 3D printer's "microwave from the future" design is that they have a limited capacity: you can't make anything larger than the printer itself just like how you can't print out a full-size poster on a desktop inkjet. If you could train a group of robot spiders to work together collaboratively though, size limits could effectively disappear. That's the theory behind the latest project coming out of Siemens, anyway.
A few years past the 100th anniversary of the first assembly line in a Ford factory, the principle still rings true: You can make something faster with many hands working on small parts individually. "The idea," says Livio Dalloro, head of the company's Product Design, Simulation & Modeling Research and leader of the robot spider program, "is really to make these flexible autonomous, communicating, general purpose machines."
To do that, Siemens has created six-legged robots with depth-perception cameras and awareness of their surroundings. Each robot will take its own size into account and work specifically in its designated area. They'll even work in shifts so they can reload printing material and recharge, downloading data into a fresh robot after two hours. Mobile robots could simply be given a design for a project and break it up amongst themselves.
At this point, the robots are too imprecise to build anything yet. The collaborative process is a complex one, even for robot spiders that are operated by a hivemind. Each bot requires an understanding of its own abilities and those of fellow builders iiun order to work efficiently as a group. Siemens isn't building the robots towards any specific goal right now, but sees the bots as the future of construction. Dalloro's team has already got one robot to build a small plastic object, now they're working on getting two together to build with concrete. Unleash the swarms.
Source: QZ
