SiDi Lab has been working closely with AM3 Lab and AMBOTs, a pioneer start-up company in advanced additive manufacturing, to research and develop swarm 3D printing and assembly technologies. We recently received funding from National Science Foundation SBIR program (Phase 1) to expand current 3D printing capabilities with a swarm 3D printing and assembly platform (SPA).

SPA synergistically integrates 3D printing techniques with swarm robotics, thus effectively addressing the issues pertaining to print time, print cost and print quality – the three objectives that current 3D printing technologies cannot simultaneously achieve. The primary intellectual merit of this project lies in a new approach to realizing cooperative 3D printing and manufacturing between multiple independent 3D printers and robots, which provides a modular and reconfigurable digital manufacturing platform. In this project, we propose a new hardware platform based on a novel mobile 3D printer with a Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA) and a new software to coordinate multiple mobile 3D printers and assembly robots. This enables multi-color and multi-material printing, as well as integration of pre-manufactured components into print jobs. The anticipated technical outcome is an integrated SPA system that is capable of printing large-scale objects while assuring print quality comparable to current small-scale commercial 3D printers. For more information about this project, please visit here.

Our research on swarm 3D printing and cooperative 3D printing technologies has been highlighted by media. See this post.