Gizmos & Gadgets: Spider Robots Bring Portability and Autonomy to 3D Printing

May 2, 2016 – If Siemens is right then the future of manufacturing on assembly lines will be crawling with spider robots that extrude, not silk, but plastics and other materials. This is unlike any conventional 3D printing (which is hard to describe as conventional at the moment) or manufacturing assembly process. Teams of the spider robots will be capable of receiving instructions and then creating and assembling manufactured products.

If you take a look at the video provided here note that calling these robots spiders is a misnomer. After all spiders have eight legs and these little 3D printing bots have only six. Each is equipped with a 3D camera and laser scanner to map their immediate environment and a 3D printer arm.

Their official name is SiSpis which is short for Siemen Spiders, and they are perfect for doing small production runs of complex items. In test labs at Siemens the robots to-date are partially automated but the plan is to make them fully autonomous and capable of adapting to changes in their work environment.

The robots are the product of the Siemens Corporate Technology Lab at Princeton University. Their inventor is Livio Dalloro, head of the Product Design, Modeling and Simulation Research Group at Siemens. Dalloro describes their purpose: “We are looking at using multiple autonomous robots for collaborative additive manufacturing of structures, such as car bodies, the hulls of ships and airplane fuselages.”

The key to their effectiveness is collaboration. The SiSpis can work independently or in coordinated swarm fashion. From an army of one to one of two thousand you can imagine them assembling objects as big as a ship’s hull or airplane wing. They can work on flat or curved surfaces and divide a work area into a complex of vertical boxes because they are designed to have situational awareness. Hasan Sinan Bank, one of the key people behind SiSpis technology states, “Each spider is capable of manufacturing only a small portion of a work piece.” And when asked about this approach he offers the following comment, “No one else has attempted to do this using mobile manufacturing.”