Robots have at last made their way into mainstream American life. Or into Bay Area life, anyway, where drones hover above Dolores Park and deliver OTC drugs to your house. Whatever. But this robot...this robot...is something else. This robot can 3D print an honest-to-goodness bridge.
As reported this morning by Fast Company's John Brownlee, Dutch designer Joris Laarman has dreamed up a robot with the capability to 3D print a one-of-kind steel bridge, which he plans to put to the test in real life in Amsterdam come 2017. Brownlee writes:
In 2017, Dutch designer Joris Laarman will wheel a robot to the brink of a canal in Amsterdam. He'll hit an "on" button. He'll walk away. And when he comes back two months later, the Netherlands will have a new, one-of-a-kind bridge, 3-D printed in a steel arc over the waters. This isn't some proof-of-concept, either: when it's done, it will be as strong and as any other bridge. People will be able to walk back and forth over it for decades. That's the plan, anyway.
So Laarman started R&D company MX3D, "which specializes in building six-axis robots that can 3-D print metal and resin in mid-air," Fast Company reports. "The tech allows for large-scale objects like infrastructure to be printed in the exact spot where they'll live, which has radical implications for the construction industry and opens up a wealth of new design possibilities." Sheesh, no kidding.
But Laarman, however genius the guy clearly is, needed some high-tech help. To get the printing portion done right, he called upon none other than AutoDesk, the super amazing architecture and engineering lab headquartered in San Rafael, whose equally super amazing Thursday Design Nights in San Francisco we can't say enough good things about.
The challenges to the project are obviously massive, but if successful, so are the implications: "When it's built over the course of two months in fall of 2017, the MX3D's finished bridge will be the first step toward that future. If it works, who knows what's next? Ten years from now, we might watch skyscrapers be built by massive 3-D printing cranes, lifting themselves up as they squirt massive industrial steel girders beneath themselves."
Check out video of the bridge actualization below, and head over to Fast Company to read the whole story and watch more cool video, here.
