The construction industry of the future will increasingly turn to 3D printing, as researchers go from strength to strength in devising printing systems suited for building structures. The latest buzz looks at what a Singapore team has accomplished, in showing moving robots at work.

Nanyang Technological University and colleagues have shown that two machines can operate on a single project working in tandem.

The mobile robots are shown in a video performing 3D printing a large structure and they are doing it fairly quickly. Evan Ackerman in IEEE Spectrum said, “Roboticists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have, for the first time (as far as they know), performed ‘the actual printing of a single-piece concrete structure by two mobile robots operating concurrently.'”

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In their paper, “Large-scale 3D Printing by a Team of Mobile Robots,” the team said they used the Ubuntu operating system for system integration, ROS for device control among other things, and OpenRAVE for planning and collision-checking.

You can see two robots in the video concurrently put their “noses” down to the ground to get busy on concurrent printing. Worth noting is the robots’ mobility. In the building and construction industry, a 3D printing solution often means printing smaller pieces, to be assembled on-site. What may result are process complexities and potential weaknesses at the assembly interfaces.

So, is it the way it has to be—one must print in pieces and assemble later? To tackle size restrictions of printers on site, this team of researchers from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore removed the size restrictions of a printer altogether by using robotic arms on mobile platforms.

Their workaround: multiple mobile robots concurrently printing a large, single-piece, structure. 3DPrinting.com, describing the system’s features, wrote, “The system holds a robotic arm atop moving robotic cars with mini motion tyres.”

The construct would offer projects deploying the robots some flexibility and freedom—the machines, even if put to work in building projects that vary in area, need not undergo system changes.

Keep reading this blog on TechXplore.com

 

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