Robot Spiders Weave Products from Plastic in a New Spin on 3-D Printing

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, 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.