Additive manufacturing and robots are parallel technologies, both digitally enabled tools for manufacturing that are advancing in adoption. But they also enable each other. 3D printing can provide the grippers, end effectors and other specialized tooling that robots require to serve production. And robots are driving AM forward as well. Collaborative robots or cobots are being used to tend 3D printer farms, sometimes mounted on an autonomous guided vehicle (AGV) for a fully mobile, as well as automated, solution. And robots are opening opportunities for larger and more complex part production, by providing the motion for a growing number of large format additive manufacturing (LFAM) systems.

In this episode of AM Radio, Gardner Business Media Robots & Autonomy editor Julia Hider joins Stephanie Hendrixson and Peter Zelinski to discuss how AM and robots interact, and specific examples of this interaction.

Transcript

Stephanie Hendrixson  00:05

From 3D printed end effectors to autonomous production, there are many ways that robots and additive manufacturing are advancing together. Robots and autonomy reporter Julia Hider joins us for this special episode on robots and am stay tuned.

Peter Zelinski  00:27

This episode of AM Radio is brought to you by The Cool Parts Show, a video series dedicated to how innovative 3D printed parts and additive manufacturing are changing production. Watch the latest episodes now at TheCoolPartsShow.com.

Stephanie Hendrixson  00:48

Welcome to AM Radio, the show where we tune into what's happening in additive manufacturing. I'm Stephanie Hendrixson. I'm joined in the studio today, as usual, by Pete Zelinski.

Pete Zelinski

Hey, Stephanie

Stephanie Hendrixson

And we have a special guest with us today, Julia Hider. So folks who have been listening to AM Radio for a while or following Additive Manufacturing Media, you might remember Julia from past episodes. She used to be a reporter with Additive Manufacturing Media. She's now with our sister brand, Modern Machine Shop, but she's here because she also has a special focus on robots and autonomy. So Hi Julia. Welcome back to the podcast.

Julia Hider  01:21

Hi Stephanie and Pete. I'm so excited to be back here with you guys.

Stephanie Hendrixson  01:24

So we want to talk about robots today, and it was a natural fit to bring you in for that. Can you tell us a little bit more about your role as the robots and autonomy writer and just what does that mean? What are you doing as part of that?

Julia Hider  01:37

Yeah. So when I left Additive Manufacturing a couple years ago, I went back to covering metalworking and subtractive manufacturing for Modern Machine Shop. And then a few months ago, I got the opportunity to start this new beat that intersects with all of the manufacturing brands under our parent company, Gardner Business Media. So now I split my time between writing for Modern Machine Shop and covering robotics and autonomous vehicles and all sorts of manufacturing applications.

Stephanie Hendrixson  02:05

And so the company we work for, Gardner Business Media, has all these different titles in the manufacturing space. And like robots and autonomy is one of those topics that is touching all of them. And so much like additive manufacturing, much like additive manufacturing. And so in this role, looking at this thing that is relevant for all of our brands. Kind of how are you reporting on that?

Julia Hider  02:27

Yeah, so I'm just going out finding the robotics stories that interest me and are relevant to all of our audiences. I write them up, we distribute them to whichever brand is the best fit, and we do have a page that aggregates all of that content, and we can put a link to that in the show notes.

Peter Zelinski  02:45

So when Julia said, “Yeah, much like additive,” that kind of tees up the conversation I was hoping we would have when we report on what's happening with additive, we're looking at this really big thing, which, in various ways, connects to an even bigger thing, which is the ways that manufacturing is changing and the advance of various digital manufacturing technologies, ideas, disruptors, that, in their way interconnect. And we see a lot of that with additive manufacturing and robots, like they keep on showing up in the same place together, like they're at the same crime scene. And additive and robots both are advancing. Both interconnect, and that interconnection, in part, explains the advance of each one, because there are ways there they are enabling one another. Like, let's look at this whole big picture of how robots and additive interrelate. But let's paint that picture by coloring in different aspects of it to kind of like, paint by numbers fill up the whole.

Stephanie Hendrixson  03:58

Yeah. And the way that I kind of think about topics like this is it goes in two directions, right? There's how 3D printing enables robots and makes them better, and then there's how robots enable 3D printing and makes it better. And I think maybe those are the two halves of our show today.

Peter Zelinski  04:15

Okay, yeah. Where would you start? Julia?

Julia Hider  04:17

I think the easiest place to get a grip on this topic is to start with how —

Peter Zelinski

Cue the groaning.

Julia Hider

— 3D printing enables robots. And so the most common example that I see in that space is 3D printed end effectors. I've collected a few examples that I've written about over the years. They spend my time with AM and Modern Machine Shop and my robotic specific reporting. So the first example I have is from an article I wrote for Additive Manufacturing about a company called Savage Automation, and they specialize in 3D printed end effectors for injection molding. And injection molding is such a high-volume process that automation can bring a lot of benefit. But at the same time, I learned in writing this article that a lot of these end effectors that are used in these applications come from kits that injection molders have to assemble themselves, so they need to be adjusted a lot, and then they eventually wear out. But at the same time, it's really important that these grippers work properly, because if they miss a part and it's still stuck in the mold, when the mold closes again, it can damage the mold, which is a really big deal, because that causes downtime, and molds are expensive. So Richard Savage, he's the founder of the company he was working in as an injection molder and experiencing all these issues with end effectors for the robotics that were automating his injection molding operations. So he started designing and 3D printing his own end effectors, and then eventually spun out a company based on that.

Stephanie Hendrixson  05:49

So I guess I didn't know that a lot of the examples of 3D printed end effectors I've seen, people will say like, this was assembly consolidation. It would have been many more parts if we had made it some other way. And the piece of information that I've just learned for the first time is that it's literally the molders assembling the gripper from some like, pre-established kit of parts. And so that makes it a lot more concrete for me. Like the the amount of savings in terms of somebody sitting there putting parts together is is kind of what you're getting to avoid by 3D printing the grippers instead.

Peter Zelinski  06:22

That there's like assembly work right within manufacturing, in the course of just making a part, a part that's going to be part of another assembly later. Yeah.

Julia Hider  06:30

So 3D printed grippers can have tons of benefits. First of all, the setup is easier because grippers and the suction cups don't need to be assembled or adjusted. They're less likely to miss parts. They're more accurate. The lead times are shorter than other custom solutions, and they're also lighter, which can open up robotics to heavier applications, and it means less wear and tear on the robot itself. And the robot also might be able to move faster.

Peter Zelinski  06:56

Gripper, end effector, end-of-arm tooling, like what's the terminology you hear the most?

Julia Hider  07:01

Honestly, I hear all three. I don't feel like any one of them necessarily has fallen out of favor, but gripper, kind of is more of a limited term. I think of it as something that is picking something up, or as end effector, end-of-arm tooling, or kind of broader terms that could be something that's not necessarily picking something up.

Stephanie Hendrixson  07:23

That sounds right. And I think I said gripper, and maybe I should have said end-of-arm tool.

Julia Hider  07:26

Well, I mean, I think I think this one is like, these are grippers. But yeah, in the article, I do have pictures of kits of assembled grippers. So yeah, if you're interested in seeing what that looks like, and compared to the 3D printed version, we have pictures of that.

Stephanie Hendrixson  07:41

And we'll put links in the show notes to everything that we're talking about, so you can see the pictures too.

Julia Hider  07:46

So the next example I came across is from a company called Rapid Robotics, which I wrote about for Modern Machine Shop in an article about robotics as a service, which is just a different model for automation, where instead of the end user buying the equipment and then hiring an integrator or setting everything up themselves, a company like Rapid will come in. They'll charge the users a startup fee and then sort of a subscription fee, and they handle everything from the design integration, training, service monitoring, in addition to the robot itself and all of the peripherals, which includes safety systems, vision systems, and end effectors, which it 3D prints. Steve Barsanti is the VP of Customer operations at rapid and he said that 90% of the end effectors the company uses are 3D printed, and it does all of its 3D printing in house. Steve said they have a small bay of Markforged printers where they print all of their grippers, and the benefits that he mentioned were cost and lead time. So not only can rapid get custom 3D printed grippers faster than off the shelf ones, they're cheaper.

Peter Zelinski  08:51

Also like what I'm drawing out of that, what I'm inferring is their robotics as a service business model that Lydd printing for end-of-arm tooling is a real enabler of that.

Julia Hider  09:03

Yeah, exactly the customer that I spoke to. One of the things that was a huge benefit to bringing in this robotics as a service company is that they were able to set everything up so fast. And 3D printing is definitely an enabler.

Stephanie Hendrixson  09:18

Do they call it RaaS?

Julia Hider  09:19

Yes, it is called RaaS, and I was very proud of the title for that article. I think it was something like kicking this now “Kicking RaaS With Robotics As a Service.” I was very proud of that, and very impressed that I got away with that.

Stephanie Hendrixson  09:33

Well done.

Julia Hider  09:33

Thank you. So I also saw a few examples from BMW on additive manufacturing's website, and they were particularly cool for a few reasons. First of all, they're designed to handle very large parts. So the first one in the article was used for tending a press that makes roofs for the BMW M model. So big parts. And there is also some cool 3D printing processes used to make these grippers the. First one uses SLS for some of the components of the vacuum grippers and the clamps, and then the shell and the bearing structure were made using large format additive manufacturing. BMW eventually went and redesigned this the bearing structure using topology optimization to create what they call a bionic robotic gripper. And so now the bearing structure is produced via sand casting with 3D printed mold cores. So they have a lot of different processes going on here. They also have another plant that's using a LFAM gripper to handle doors, so another very large part. Oh, and then there's another gripper that they're using that's also bionic, also produced via 3D printed sand casting cores, and that one can hold and move the entire floor assembly of a BMW ili. So they mentioned a lot of the same benefits that I covered earlier, including reduced costs, lead times, reduced weights. They also talk about reduced emissions from reduced energy usage and using recycled materials in the LFAM process.

Stephanie Hendrixson  10:59

I remember this article and like, it's really kind of crazy. It sort of stretched my understanding of what a robot end effector is, just because these grippers, or whatever we're calling them, they're so big, like they have to be able to grab the entire door of a car or the entire floor or roof assembly. Like it's kind of crazy. And then coupling that with the bionic nature of it, using like topology optimization like this is a design strategy I think we mostly see applied to end use parts, but it's really, really effective for tooling, especially when you know we're talking about lightweighting. Get the weight out so that the robot can move faster, can be more efficient, can use less energy. And it's really, really cool to see how BMW is applying that to this internal tooling for the robots.

Peter Zelinski  11:47

Yeah, in terms of engineering, end-of-arm tooling is underappreciated. Yeah, I remember a Formnext where I was just walking down the aisle and there was a robot with a big, wild, custom engineered end-of-arm tool for a bit really large component, like we're talking about. And I mean, I was just like, struck by just how visually impressive it was, like I was kind of stopped short, and was just sort of like, like watching the robot operate, looking at the intricacy of this end-of-arm tool. I took a photo of it that I still have, and like, we'll find a way to link to that in the show notes.

Julia Hider  12:28

I was gonna say, are we gonna link to it in the show notes? But yeah, I feel like we can all envision robots in automotive manufacturing facilities, but we don't necessarily think about how the robot is picking those huge components up. So yes, underappreciated. So yeah, that was a that article was a really good look at that.

And then I saw one more example of a 3D printed gripper very recently at Carnegie Mellon Stephanie was recently there reporting on their Additive Manufacturing Research at the Manufacturing Futures Institute that happens to be colocated with the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute, or ARM. And I just happened to have a trip to Pittsburgh already planned, so she kindly put me in contact with them, and I was able to visit the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute. And one of the main tools they use there for research is this test bed, which has four small robots mounted to tables. They're used for all kinds of different things, but a lot of the tasks used in their research involve LEGO and so the team needed to figure out a way for the robot to pick up LEGO bricks and then either add them or remove them to the part they're building. So they designed a 3D printed gripper. It's really clever. It engages with the little round studs on the top of the brick. And if you want the robot to pick the brick up, it moves down, and the gripper engages with the studs on top, and it moves to one side to kind of peel the brick away from whatever it's attached to on the bottom. And then when it wants to place the brick somewhere else, it moves the brick into position and then moves to the opposite side to sort of disengage itself from the brick. It's kind of hard to describe, but I have a video of it that we can link to in the show notes. And 3D printing works really well for this application, because it's fast, it's cheap, and they were printing them at their on-campus lab, but eventually the arm Institute got its own desktop polymer 3D printer so they can print them as the grippers were out.

Stephanie Hendrixson  14:23

So this is really cool, because I was in that same facility. I saw those robots, but I was there to talk about other things, dealing with additive and so, like, I didn't get to really dive into the LEGO robots too much, but we'll link to my coverage of Carnegie Mellon as well. The question that I have, because this is not something I got to see, what does the gripper intended for LEGOs look like?

Julia Hider  14:46

It kind of looks like a small stick with the there's like a side on one side, and then it's open on the other side, and there's a picture of it. So. If you want to watch the video of it working, I think that's maybe one of the next ones on there.

Stephanie Hendrixson  15:05

So it's weird, because it kind of looks like you took a LEGO brick and, like, extended it and just made it really long, but then it's got this sort of edge on it. Okay, so there's a person holding a couple of LEGO bricks that are assembled together in one hand, and then this gripper in the other hand, and she's sort of attaching the gripper to the top and then rocking it to the side, and the LEGO pops right off. I feel like this is something that could be a human end-of-arm tool as well as a robot tool. It actually looks pretty handy.

Julia Hider  15:35

I think they actually base the design. I think there is a human tool for disassembling and assembling LEGO like that. And I think the design was based off of that. That's very cool, yeah, but yeah, I learned a lot about LEGO on that trip.

Peter Zelinski  15:51

So the end-of-arm tool is this direct interface between the robot and the part, maybe the most direct way that 3D printing enables robotic automation. As I've been exploring and covering these, these automation successes that that apply additive one of the things I've come to understand is there's a lot more hardware going on required than just the gripper, and a lot of it is so simple, but it's like, like, the goal of any robotic automation installation is the chance to walk away from it for a long time and just know it's going to produce and so you need, like, cuffs to pull cables out of the way of the robot movement, and trays for staging parts and brackets to hold sensors to assure everything's operating correctly. And every automation installation has a lot of that kind of stuff going on, to the extent that a facility that's going to make a broad commitment to robots, needs a lot of this stuff.

Like the poster child for this, I think, is this plant. It's not far from where we are right now. It's in Hamilton, Ohio. Thyssenkrup Bilstein make shock absorbers. Huge difficulty filling all of the staff positions they need. Been aggressive about using collaborative robots to automate everything they can, to stretch their their manufacturing staffing as far as it can go. And that was really the impediment that they found. One of the impediments was getting not just the grippers, not just the end-of-arm tooling, but all this stuff they need around it to do automation installations, because if they relied on external manufacturers to make all this custom tooling for them, they couldn't move fast enough, they couldn't be nimble enough, they couldn't prove out their systems fast enough. So Thyssenkrup Bilstein’s commitment to robotic automation has involved this big commitment to 3D printing too. There are, like, the last time I was there, 14 different 3D printers now in their fleet throughout the facility, including Multi Jet Fusion for some of the tooling they do some of the more rigid tooling, like that supports optics, like vision systems. And at this point, there's been for something like 33 cobot installations. There's something like 60 different custom hardware designs they've developed and applied quickly just to do all these things that automation needs done. Yeah.

Stephanie Hendrixson  18:38

That reminds me of a conversation that I had recently, where it was a supplier relationship, but at NPE: The Plastics Show in May, I visited with Universal Robots, and they had in their booth this other company, which is kind of their integration partner, EMI Corporation. And the conversation that I had with Universal Robots, it went kind of in the direction that you're describing, Pete, that like it's not so much programming the cobot That is the difficulty anymore. They're pretty easy to program. They're pretty easy to move around your facility and train them to do different things. The problem and the difficulty that Universal Robots and its customers run up against is, how is the cobot going to interact with everything around it? And it's things like rippers, but it's also things like cable management and part nests and positioning the parts, you know, so that the robot can grab them, and all these things. And so EMI has been a good collaborator and kind of partner with them, because they are the ones that can kind of bridge that gap between the cobot and whatever it needs to interact with on the shop floor.

So EMI is doing things like 3D printing, end-of-arm tooling, part nests, those cuffs to hold the cables out of the way, kind of anything that a customer might need to keep their automation cell working. They're also using Multi Jet Fusion for a lot of that that work. And so in my conversation with Universal Robots, they kind of gave. Credit to EMI and the work that they're doing as being sort of key to enabling cobot adoption and sort of encouraging that there's this thing that Travis Langford, the channel and business development manager at Universal robot, said, and I'll just kind of paraphrase it here, but he said peripherals are the challenge. Like it's not the robot anymore. It's the interface between the robot and the machine. It's the safety measures. It's the end-of-arm tooling, and 3D printed tooling is important because it helps robots get installed. You're solving that interaction between the robot and everything else that is helping automation move forward.

Peter Zelinski  20:34

That maybe is a good place to break at the start. Stephanie, I like the way that you framed this idea, there are two big halves of it, the way that additive enables robots and the way that robots are enabling additive. I feel like we've talked around the first half of that a lot. Let's pause here and come back and flip it around and talk about the ways that robots are helping additive advance.

I'm Pete Zelinski.

Stephanie Hendrixson  21:05

I'm Stephanie Hendrixson.

Peter Zelinski  21:06

In addition to appearing on AM Radio, we cohost The Cool Parts Show, a video series about interesting 3D printed parts.

Stephanie Hendrixson  21:13

In every episode, we highlight a cool 3D printed part that has something to say about where additive manufacturing is headed. And now we're inviting you behind the scenes.

Peter Zelinski  21:21

Sign up for The Cool Parts Show All Access newsletter, a monthly email for fans of the show. We'll keep you up to date with early access links to our latest episodes and exclusive video extras for subscribers.

Stephanie Hendrixson  21:34

You'll also find out how to enter future giveaways and get a few hints about what we're working on next. You'll even have the chance to send in your questions for experts on upcoming episodes. We'll give you a shout out if we use yours in a video.

Peter Zelinski  21:45

Sign up today at TheCoolPartsShow.com/AllAccess.

Stephanie Hendrixson  21:48

And if you're not already familiar with the show, check out our catalog of past episodes. We've got everything from 3D printed custom shoes to innovative medical implants to generatively designed parts for space.

Peter Zelinski  21:59

Find it all at TheCoolPartsShow.com.

Peter Zelinski  22:06

Welcome back. We're talking about robots and additive manufacturing. Additive manufacturing and robots. In the first half, we talked about end-of-arm tooling and other ways that 3D printing is an aid to the advance in adoption of robot technology for automation. There is an opposite way to look at this, which is the way that robots are bringing new possibilities, broader possibilities, to additive manufacturing. And let's look at that part of it. Stephanie, where would you start with that?

Stephanie Hendrixson  22:41

I think kind of the obvious place to start is robots tending 3D printers. And I want to kick this off with kind of an old example, because I want to talk about maybe how far we have come since then. So the instance of this that comes right to mind, and this was sort of maybe my first experience writing about automation back in 2019, Pete, you and I visited this plastics processor called Evco, and they had this little print farm. It was a bunch of Markforged printers, I think, like Mark Twos, and there were maybe nine of them in this arrangement, and they were being tended by a cobot. And at the time, like, the really interesting thing about this system was actually the difficulty that they had in getting the robot to talk to the printers or to understand what was going on with the printers, because there was no connection or software or interface really built into that.

And so I went back and looked at the article, and they had come up with this whole system. Every time the Markforged printer stopped a build or completed a build, it would trigger this automated email. And so they taught software to read the subject line of the auto generated email. It was then matched to a SQL database with information about all the jobs that they had in work that somehow got sent to a PLC that directed the robot to go grab that build plate and replace it with a fresh one. And then they also had the robot picking up a stylus so that it could interact with the touchscreen on the printer to restart the build. So captcha, you got nothing on this robot. But that is a really clunky and difficult and I know it took them a long time to develop this solution, and so I'm curious to hear Julia and Pete like, what are some more recent examples of robots tending printers, and how much further maybe have we come since those days?

Julia Hider  24:30

Wait,Stephanie, can I ask you what kind of gripper was the that robot using?

Stephanie Hendrixson  24:37

I think it may have been like the standard gripper that I don't think it was 3D printed. It wasn't. It wasn't 3D printed. No, it was. It was sort of like a like, almost like a pair of tongs, kind of that just sort of was able to clamp around the the stylus and pick it up. Because

Julia Hider  24:51

that sort of reminds me of another story about robotic grippers that I wrote recently. I'm going to talk about gripper some more, but these ones aren’t 3D printed. They're soft robotic grippers, so they're made from like rubber or silicone instead of hard plastic or metal, and the softer material means they're more flexible, both literally and figuratively, in terms of the applications they can handle. They're mostly right now used in applications with delicate parts or parts that are irregular in size and shape, so they're big in food processing and packaging. Think of the example in the article is picking up strawberries. They're all different sizes and shapes, and they're pretty delicate. But I could there also could be applications for 3D printing, where you have a batch of parts, or a print farm that's making parts in all different sizes and shapes.

Peter Zelinski  25:42

I was fascinated by that article, and it's nuanced, and it's worth it's worth putting a circle around this. We're talking about grippers again, but now we're talking about it differently, because 3D printed parts. I mean, the reason to do it oftentimes, is crazy geometric forms or light weighting, or lattices or delicate forms that can't be made in a solid form really easily, that often require intricate assembly work, and the very next challenge after 3D printing is, how do you handle it? How do you clamp on it? How do you manipulate it? And so these soft grippers that inherently conform to a delicate object, including food items, produce is inherently slightly different geometry every time. Delicate additive manufactured parts fit that description too.

Stephanie Hendrixson  26:31

There's another thing here with the Evco story, the robot wasn't actually touching the parts itself. It was always picking up and dealing with the build plates. But the reason that they needed the robot was because they had all these printers that were constantly printing objects of different sizes and therefore different build times. And so instead of having somebody constantly running back to check the print farm and taking build plates off, loading new ones, just have the robot there to tend them and to deal with the jobs as they get completed, whatever time frame that takes.

Julia Hider  27:03

That actually reminds me Stephanie of a 3D printer I saw at Rapid a few years ago, the Mosaic Array. And it's this 3D printer that's four 3D printers in one and it has a gantry system that, like you said, unloads the print bed. So that was their solution to not having a gripper, was just take the whole print bed out and put in a new one.

Peter Zelinski  27:27

This is so interesting because that Mosaic system is basically a print farm in one machine, and inherently part of making that work, to Stephanie's point, is a robot that can take care of these transitions from one build to the next. Stephanie, you talked about how you went back to like an early story, to benchmark the progress that we've made, and as I listen to that comparison, the integrated Mosaic system versus that application those years ago at Evco? Yeah, it's clear there has been progress here that I haven't realized we've been charting all along, because I think of some other way stations that we've seen along the way that Evco system was using email and a physical stylus pushing buttons to do the integration. The integration is a hard part of this.

So a more advanced application, and this one also it goes back a couple years now, but a more advanced integration application, you and I saw it was at Ford, their autonomous robot named Javier.

Julia Hider

I love when people name their robots.

Peter Zelinski

Right? You almost have to it loads and unloads Carbon 3D printers. And that meant there are these different systems in play. There is carbons build management software that is running the 3D printing cycle. The robot is from Kuka, and there is software around that allowing it to navigate through the facility. But then there is Ford's own production management software, which is also a significant piece of that. And the challenge with that application was not so much in the hardware. I'm sure there were challenges there, but the challenge that the Ford team talked about was in the software integration, which was worth doing, because 3D printing lends itself to the robotic automation, as you described, and even the autonomous automation, because the build cycles are just long enough that there is time for a robot to carry parts throughout the facility and carry them to the next operation. In fact, there was a recent neat demonstration of this at Formnext that I saw involving company branch robotics, and they showed this demo. Now of autonomous robotics for tending a print farm, which happened to be lots of different desktop 3D printers, and just that difference is where the challenge came in, because every different printer is a slightly different geometric situation in terms of how to interact with it. At that Evco application, it was all the same Markforged machines, meaning you solve how to grab the build surface one time, and you've inherently solved it for all the machines. So you could have a print farm with many different 3D printers, and probably many, or most print farms are going to look like that, but the automation will involve this interface challenge at each step and again, 3d, printing is an enabler. There the UltiMaker printers within that branch robotics demo were particularly useful for this kind of automated production. But even there, grabbing the glass plate that the printer builds on was just difficult enough. They 3D printed these pegs that hold the plate up just a little bit at this angle, and that tiny, simple hardware was just the breakthrough that made automation of that system, very easy in that demo.

Stephanie Hendrixson  31:23

Yeah, for all of the talk about digital manufacturing and these advanced technologies, sometimes it's just as simple as adding a little bit of height to your build plate.

Peter Zelinski  31:32

Well said, well said, digital manufacturing sometimes involves some crude hardware, right? Let's transition, because there is this obvious case of robots enabling 3D printing that we haven't talked about yet, which is the robot being the 3D printer.

Stephanie Hendrixson  31:49

Yeah, I've been thinking about this recently because I've just had a story posted where they're using a robot arm as the motion for a 3D printer. So the story is about a company called Alquist 3D they are headquartered in Greeley, Colorado, and they are a construction 3D printing company. So they don't want to necessarily like design and build buildings and like manage developments themselves, but they're working on creating the technology that they can license to other people and let them build buildings and infrastructure and all kinds of things using basically a big Kuka robot arm that's mounted on this mobile trailer, and then it has a print nozzle that extrudes this specialized geopolymer that they've developed. And so the whole idea is that instead of like going to a job site and setting up this whole gantry 3D printer, which is how a lot of the other construction 3D printers are set up. You can just roll up this trailer with the robot on top, take some measurements, kind of get things set up, and then just start printing. And the advantage of the robot on a trailer is it's got a smaller footprint than the gantry. It's easier to set up. You need fewer people to run it, and it's also, by nature of its size, just more mobile. And so you can do things like maybe get into a tighter building lot to build a smaller home. You could repair buildings that are already there. You can add on to buildings, and for them the flexibility of the robot and the ease of setup and moving it around is what makes this a better solution, in their opinion, than something that's running off of a gantry.

Peter Zelinski  33:30

3D printing is not a high force process, and that little fact has this huge implication, like all my background in how I understand manufacturing and making parts. It comes from years of writing about machining, and there are basic truths in machining that you don't even think about, and one of them is, if you're going to make a big part, you need a big machine. Big parts is big cutting, and you need a big machine to deal with that when you have a low force process like 3D printing, it inherently means you don't need that big machine, the big frame around the big part, in order to make that part. And so robots as as a part making mechanism, even for parts that are ultimately much bigger than the robot, like that becomes practical, and that becomes, in many cases, the way to go. I guess what comes to mind is the the metal deposition additive applications we've seen with robotics, Lincoln Electric additive solutions and some of the big machine components that that we've seen and have been able to cover components that do require some machining in most cases, but essentially are are so close to net shape that they're almost completed through 3D printing, making necessary what would otherwise require, like, like a casting process to produce this, this gigantic metal form.

Stephanie Hendrixson  35:06

Yeah, it kind of flips the natural, I don't know, the natural logic. Maybe you're thinking, if the final size of my part is X big, I need a machine that is bigger than the thing that I want to make. And with a robot and with 3D printing, that's not necessarily true anymore. The robot can make things that are much larger than itself.

Peter Zelinski  35:26

So a place where this is really playing out additive engineering solutions in Akron and this is a company founded on making really big composite structures, tooling and parts on big gantry, 3D printers, big machines, and now they have their first robot, and they're thinking through the differences and the weirdness of that. One of the differences is the robot is more nimble. It's quicker to install easier, which means it's easier to relocate within the facility if they want to reorganize. And part of the weirdness is build volume, the big gantry machine, the build area. The build volume is obviously a box with the robot. It is, what if the robot can pivot all the way around itself, then the build volume is a donut. And the challenge becomes, how do you park your work piece inside of the donut so that it fits? So they're thinking through all of that.

Julia Hider  36:27

You know, the large volume of these parts takes me back to the BMW example, kind of because you need large grippers for large parts. So I don't know that the BMW grippers were printed using printing process with robots for the large format. But that could be an example of robotics enabling 3D printing, enabling robotics.

Peter Zelinski  36:49

Yeah, you're right. That's that's trippy, actually.

Stephanie Hendrixson  36:53

So there's another kind of crazy thing on the horizon, or maybe it's already here, dealing with a build volume that looks like a donut. One way around that, that I'm starting to see people adopt is take the robot and don't make it stationary, put it on a track or something. Give it some movement so that it can build up to and beyond the donut. Maybe build multiple parts I want so Alquist 3D the company that I mentioned, they actually want to establish, like a factory to print smaller things, like planters, benches. And so their idea is basically you would have robots on tracks that could move between build areas. So stop in one place, build up a planter, slide down the track a little bit more, build the next planter, and kind of just use it for ongoing production.

But I've also seen examples, or at least we're getting close to examples, of using robots on tracks to build bigger parts, even using multiple robots in tandem. So there was a story that I wrote recently about this company called Double D Trailers, and they make custom horse trailers, and I learned from the founder, Brad Heath that this is an industry that is dealing with all kinds of lead time challenges. There are just so many different parts that go into a trailer. There's lots of things that need to get welded. You need to install windows and maybe electrical, maybe plumbing, if there's living quarters in the trailer. They are looking at lead times of 10 months or more to build a new custom trailer, and he's really interested in using large format additive manufacturing to be able to build the structure almost in its entirety much more quickly. They are working right now with a company called Loci Robotics in Knoxville, which has a robot on a gantry, but it's not quite big enough. They've printed a scale prototype of this trailer, but they've printed it as large as they can go with just that one robot on its track. But they are looking towards this future. They want to establish basically a horse trailer 3D printing factory that would have two robots on two different tracks, printing the trailer together in tandem. And they're estimating that if they can figure all of this out, they would be able to print one two horse trailer in just about 15 hours. So compared to 10 months of lead time, that sounds a lot better to me.

Peter Zelinski  39:09

So additive manufacturing can do the job for them, if only the robots can reach farther.

Stephanie Hendrixson  39:14

And work together. They have to cooperate, I think.

Peter Zelinski  39:18

I think that's a good place to stop. We've mentioned a lot of stuff. There is a lot in our show notes, so explore your way through that. Our various reporting on robots and additive manufacturing and how they go together. Also in the post related to this episode on additive manufacturing, dot media, a slideshow illustrations of a lot of the things we've talked about.

Stephanie Hendrixson  39:44

And if you want to find and follow all of Julia's reporting on robots and autonomy, there's a landing page for that. We will put a link to that in the show notes as well. Julia, thank you so much for joining us.

Julia Hider  39:53

Thank you guys for having me. This has been a lot of fun.

Stephanie Hendrixson  39:57

That's it for this episode of AM Radio. If you'd like the show, help us out. Give us a five-star review on whatever podcast platform you're listening on. Share it with a friend, share it with a colleague, and thank you for listening.

Peter Zelinski  40:09

AM Radio is recorded with help from Austin Grogan. The show is edited by Jodee McElfresh and Stephanie Hendrixson. Our artwork is by Kate Schrand. AM Radio and Additive Manufacturing Media are products of Gardner Business Media located in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm Pete Zelinski, thanks for listening.