Within the traditional kids's e book "Charlotte's Internet," people are amazed by a gifted spider that may weave phrases into her net. Spider-inspired robots may additionally sometime amaze people by behaving as cell 3D printers that squirt liquid plastic as an alternative of spinning silk. The German know-how large Siemens has been creating robotic and synthetic intelligence applied sciences that might doubtlessly allow swarms of such spider-worker robots to work collectively in constructing plane and ships. The dream of cellular 3D printing arose from an annual Siemens competitors that asks firm researchers to suggest and vote on technological innovation tasks. The spider-worker robots proposed by the U.S. area of Siemens received the hearts and minds of the corporate's engineers and robotics researchers and formally kicked off in January 2014.

Futurist, author and inventor Ray Kurzweil delivered a keynote speech to 800 attendees at 2016 Tech Leadership Conference in Waterloo, Canada. Ray Kurzweil envisions the future -- by year 2020, 3D printing will transform manufacturing. People will print their own clothing, he predicts. In Asia, builders are making small office buildings using modules made by 3D printers. Inventors created jet engines and cars out of printed parts, Kurzweil says. Impact on a declining manufacturing industry could be catastrophic. Jobs will be lost, manufacturing will turn into an information industry, but there's a silver lining behind industry disruption, he says. The fashion industry will explode with new ideas as people design, make and share clothes using 3D printers. Kurzweil sees manufacturing moving into open source design and production.

Many medical devices, such as hearing aids, are already 3D printed. Here's the million-dollar question: Will 3D printing be the game changer journalists like me are so eager to dub it, or is it a niche technology that's destined to become even less relevant as flexible automation solutions and collaborative manufacturing robots decline in price? Is there really a role for 3D printing outside of prototyping? Smart people spend a lot of time thinking about these things, so I reached out to one of them. John Hornick is the author of the new book, 3D Printing Will Rock the World.

The building site of the future is going to look very different to the one we are all used to today. Instead of men in high-visibility jackets and hard hats, there are going to be drones buzzing overhead, robotic bulldozers and 3D printers churning out new structures. That at least is the hope of those making technological solutions. But first they have to convince the traditionally risk-averse construction industry that such change is necessary. US start-up Skycatch is using drones on some high-profile building projects - although it cannot name them because of commercial sensitivity.

I don't know why Siemens thinks "SiSpis" is a less-creepy name than "robot spider." 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. To accomplish this, the robots use onboard cameras as well as a laser scanner to interpret their immediate environment.

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.

Handheld 3D printing pens seem like a cheaper alternative to those giant autonomous boxes, but they require more patience than most of us can muster, and a decent level of artistic capability. This robot arm can help with the latter, by controlling where the pen can move to ensure better results. Like with a dedicated 3D printer, the Guided Hand system still requires a 3D model to work from. It won't improve your freehand creations. But if you wanted to recreate the Stanford Bunny, the robot arm attached to your 3D printing pen provides various types of feedback both guiding the motion of the pen, but also limiting where it can move.

Makerbot's efforts to ride the wave of global consumer 3D printer demand crashed unceremoniously on the shores of Brooklyn and, somehow, washed up in St. Petersburg, Florida. The once-hot startup announced on Monday that it would cease production of its own 3D printers, instead outsourcing to electronics manufacturing partner, Florida-based Jabil. It's been a rocky few years for the 3D printer company. First it was swallowed up by the business-focused 3D printer company Stratasys in 2013. Then in 2014, it lost its maverick CEO Brett Pettis, soon after it shut down much of it retail presence in 2014 and then shuffled through a couple of CEOs until the appointment of Jonathan Jaglom in 2015.

Retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson says the decentralization and advancements of 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology are the future of warfare, and may enable the rise of modernized private robotic armies. Wilkerson's statements were made during an exclusive interview with Rick Wiles of TRUNEWS on Thursday, while discussing the possibility that billionaires like George Soros could bring rise to a modern version of the East India Company. "As were developing these new technologies particularly 3-D printing, nanotechnology, nano engineering, artificial intelligence and robotics, as were developing these now, we are reducing enormously the costs for some of the most sophisticated weapons to be in the world," Wilkerson said. These advancements, Wilkerson noted, are already being placed into conceptual practice. "With 3-D printing we have recently produced, in less than 16 hours, a drone that underwater went to the coast of France and back to the Eastern coast of the United States, underwater.

As cool as those handheld 3D printing pens are, you have to have some amount of talent (or at least practice) in order to make anything that's much more recognizable than a mangled three-dimensional squiggle. A proper 3D printer is basically one of those 3D printing pens stapled to a robot that can move it in three axes and do a much better job making things that look nice and function well, but it doesn't allow for much artistic participation from you. For some people, that's the point, but if you'd like to be more directly involved, Yeliz Karadayi's thesis project, called "Guided Hand," is a 3D printing pen with a haptic interface that helps keep you from screwing things up too badly. These haptic interfaces are basically little robot arms, although you can produce the same effect with robot arms of any size). It's hard to explain how it feels to use one of these things, and the experience doesn't come through very well on video, but basically, the end of the arm (being a robot) knows exactly where it is in 3D space, which means it can tell whether it is about to intersect a virtual 3D object or not.