Season after season, residents complain about the same ruts in pavements and potholes on the road, wishing they were repaired quickly. A startup engineer with a vision looks to 3D printing robots to save the day. Robert Flitsch is the inventor of the Addibot.
Season after season, residents complain about the same ruts in pavements and potholes on the road, wishing they were repaired quickly. A startup engineer with a vision looks to 3D printing robots to save the day. Robert Flitsch invented Addibot, a small, wheeled robot capable of taking 3D printing to sites to change the surface from problematic to smooth.
The company posted an “ice resurfacing Addibot” video earlier, using water to 3D-print ice. It would drive over the surface of an ice hockey rink, resurfacing areas which had been chipped by skates. To print, water is cooled to just above its freezing point, then ejected onto the ice surface. The robot can drive over ice cut by skates and it additively prints inside the cuts, creating a smooth surface. “So long as the width of the print array accurately represents the crack or hole the Addibot is passing over, the repair work could be done at a constant speed on the order of a few miles per hour,” said Flitsch in Popular Science.
Currently in development, Addibots are being targeted for use with different materials to repair other types of surfaces such as roads and sidewalks. They could do crack repair, pothole repair, and seal coating for transportation departments and large road engineering firms.
“Underneath the chassis of an Addibot is an array of nozzles that, ostensibly, would lay down materials as needed to repair a variety of surfaces,” said Andrew Zaleski. This printing robot uses raw material to build surfaces up layer by layer, “much like a boxy, desktop 3D printer would, but without the same space constraints.”
Keeping dust out of what the Addibot prints is a priority, since dust has a tendency to mess up 3D prints. Flitsch says he’s working on incorporating a post-processing mechanism into the Addibot undercarriage that could ameliorate any problems dust might cause. Autonomous and semi-autonomous versions could be used to repair and construct road surfaces.
The Addibot would be a great way to move caustic materials, like tar, farther away from the people who would be working on the roads. He is thinking also about the future of electric cars and how the wheeled robots might be useful. By bringing 3D printing into the mix, Addibots would be able to blend conductive materials into roadways for transmission of electrical power, for example, or add sensors to allow communication between vehicles. They could also make for more robust roads by printing materials for added strength, such as carbon fiber.” Addibots are likely to be on the market in 1 – 3 yrs. http://techxplore.com/news/2016-01-road-d-printer-demand.html
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