SBIR Phase I: Swarm 3D Printing and Assembly for Autonomous Manufacturing

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to develop a swarm 3D printing and assembly (SPA) platform via the cooperation of multiple 3D printers and assembly robots. The SPA platform provides a new approach for faster and affordable large-size printing with multiple materials. It addresses several major barriers (e.g., limited printing capability and scalability, relatively high cost) for the adoption of 3D printing for business or personal use and provides commercial opportunities in different industries, such as architecture and construction. The ultimate vision of the project is to develop a model of a generic digital factory with autonomous mobile robots. This factory model can be replicated in communities around the world to create a network of smart factories as a digital manufacturing infrastructure such that on-demand, customized manufacturing becomes affordable. Similar to how the infrastructure of the electricity grid and the Internet transformed society, this envisioned digital manufacturing infrastructure will make it easier and more economical for product designers and entrepreneurs to bring new products to market without being discouraged by the complexity and cost of production and supply chain management. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims 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. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.