SIEMENS CREATED SPIDER BOTS THAT 3D PRINT

SIEMENS CREATED SPIDER BOTS THAT 3D PRINT

WALKING PRINTERS WHO JUST SO HAPPEN TO BE ROBOT SPIDERS

Shipbuilding is a community effort. For Siemens, that community in the future won’t just be the engineers, designers, and workmen on a project: it will also include an army of small robot spiders, 3D printing and weaving together plastic to build that hull. Think of it like a normal shipbuilding facility, only with hundreds of tiny scurrying parts, all working together.

From Siemens:

To accomplish this, the robots use onboard cameras as well as a laser scanner to interpret their immediate environment. Knowing the range of its 3D-printer arm, each robot autonomously works out which part of an area – regardless of whether the area is flat or curved – it can cover, while other robots use the same technique to cover adjacent areas. By dividing each area into vertical boxes, the robots can work collaboratively to cover even complex geometries in such a way that no box is missed. “No one else has attempted to do this using mobile manufacturing,” says [project leader Hasan Sinan] Bank.

The robots even work in shifts -- after two hours of work, a tired spider will transmit its data to a replacement, and then walk back and recharge itself. Right now, the technology is still young, so don’t expect to see any spider-built vessels on the market just yet. Instead, keep an eye on this technology over the next ten years, as it goes from working prototypes to fascinating demonstrations and then finally to mundane, everyday robot swarm.

If you’re afraid of spiders, then you might find Siemens’s vision for future manufacturing lines a bit alarming.

In a lab in Princeton, New Jersey, the company’s researchers are testing spider-like robots that extrude not silk but plastic, thanks to portable 3-D printers. The robots can work together autonomously to create simple objects.

The work is at an early stage, but it hints at where manufacturing may be headed, thanks to more sophisticated robot hardware, smarter control software, and new ways of forming components using 3-D printing. Unlike a conventional robotic production line, which has to be carefully reconfigured for each new product, a team of mobile manufacturing bots would simply be given the latest design and left to go to work.

Livio Dalloro and Kurt Bettenhausen, a senior vice president at Siemens, inspect one of the 3-D printing robots.

Livio Dalloro, head of product design, modeling, and simulation at Siemens, says that the robots (which, unlike actual spiders, have only six legs) can currently produce only very simple objects, like cubes, but the idea is that they would eventually clamber around a larger, more complex object, building it as they go. “Modularity, flexibility, and autonomy are the most important trends in the shop floor,” Dalloro says.

The robots are equipped with 3-D cameras for mapping their surroundings. But they need to be able to localize themselves with a high degree of accuracy in order to work together effectively. Currently they are too imprecise to build anything very complex, and they will need to become far more sophisticated before actual manufacturing becomes feasible. But eventually mobile robots could enable production lines to produce small batches of complex products, says Dalloro.

The robots are partially automated, but will eventually become more fully autonomous, learning how to interact with their environment. “Machine learning will take more and more of a role in the future,” Dalloro says.

Jose Pachero, who codirects the Masters of Engineering in Advanced Manufacturing and Design program at MIT, says that more advanced manufacturing lines, such as those operated by Airbus and Tesla, are increasingly mobile. “This is the logical conclusion of that,” he says. “It sounds pretty cool.”

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