Additive manufacturing or 3D printing — call it what you wish — has gained a lot of attention in recent years. Once the exclusive preserve of the manufacturing sector, 3D printing has lately been used for many things: a replacement jaw for a woman in the Netherlands, a small apartment building in China, a splint to hold an infant’s windpipe open so the child could breathe normally.
Now we hear it could be headed down a new road. Literally. Robert Flitsch is a recent engineering graduate from Harvard University who was unhappy about the fact 3D printers are rarely portable. Printers with the most features, that can build large projects, tend to be large and heavy, which makes moving them around a real chore. The bigger ones have to be rigged from a gantry and outfitted with a large reservoir to hold the printing material — concrete, if it’s a construction job.
So Flitsch has devised a compact model that has wheels. He’s built four prototypes so far, and launched a start-up called Addibots that will produce and sell the little robots when they’re ready for market sometime in the next two or three years.
They’re small machines, about a metre long and about half a metre wide and tall. They’re fitted with a tank to carry the printing material. They can operate with radio control or autonomously.
Flitsch is working on a model that might be used for filling potholes. Like earlier prototypes, this one will have a series of printheads attached to the undercarriage and will be able to print, in a range of materials, directly onto the ground upon which it drives. An earlier prototype proved able to fill in cracks in an ice surface that had been badly cut up by skates. Flitsch, as you might guess, is a hockey fan.
That prototype carried a tank of water that had been pre-cooled to just above the freezing mark, then laid along cracks in the ice. Novel, perhaps, and not much use. But it was important as a proof of concept.
He sees his machine as a tool that would assist, rather than replace, road workers, while putting down a seal coat, or filling in cracks, or, yes, filling potholes.
It’s pothole season in much of Canada, a time of year when a rapid succession of freeze-thaw cycles ensures a plentiful supply of potholes to dodge. Some potholes can be big and hitting them at any speed can blow out a tire, or dent a rim, throw your wheels out of alignment, or damage your car’s suspension.
In Ottawa, this season is proving to be a bad one for potholes. Repair crews have filled 30,000 potholes so far this year, twice the number they filled in the same period last year. Crews would probably welcome help from a fleet of Flitsch’s Addibots.
The little bots will use the raw material — hot mix — to build up surfaces layer by layer, much like a boxy, desktop 3D printer would, but without the same space constraints.
Flitsch says that space is one of the main limitations that 3D printers have.
"You have to be printing inside this box, and you can really only print objects of the size of the workspace you’re printing in," he says.
With his little robots, the world can be your workspace.
Since his Addibots run on wheels, they could be used for any number of things connected with maintenance of road surfaces.
"Addibots would be a great way to move caustic materials, like tar, farther away from the people who would be working on the roads," Flitsch says.
For the moment, though, he’s working on another prototype and looking for funding so he can eventually get his Addibots onto the market. His website has more information, visit www.addibots.com.
Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@journalofcommerce.com.
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