What It Will Look Like to Work in the Tiny Robot Factories of the Future

Image: ants not robots/FreePix

Thousands of tiny ant-like robots may soon be building life-sized products. They might look like a fleet of Hot Wheels cars speeding over a circuit board, but they’re the workers in one of the world’s first micro-factories. This is the future of manufacturing according to robotics researchers at SRI International.

SRI has designed a system that uses micro-robots built to carry a payload like adhesives or components to manufacture products ranging from space-ready flight components to human tissue. An electric current flowing through a circuit board guides their magnetic chassis at high speeds—35 centimetres per second—and they can be programmed to act in concert like overcaffeinated insects trying out synchronized swimming.

“Micro-factories can be many configurations, and it is important to realize that the core technology is automation,” said Ron Pelrine, the chief scientist at SRI. That caveat aside, he and his team have a definite vision for what a micro-factory will look like, and it’s unlike any method of manufacturing we’re familiar with.

For starters, the factory floor is a printed circuit board (PCB). Flexible circuits leading from the main board to different parts of the factory form a kind of track for thousands of micro-robot workers. “The main PCB would organize the micro-factory operations while the flex circuits would provide connectivity to other devices, much like you might have cables coming off a central computer to connect to printers, cell phones, and other computers,” Pelrine said.

“There is no upper limit to how big an object the micro-robots can build,” according to Pelrine. Building a giant object could be accomplished by stacking circuit boards on top of each other so that the structure is built up in layers. Eventually, micro-factories will be able to produce objects weighing up to one ton every hour.

The technology is still new, Pelrine says, and achieving that kind of productivity will require many more robots than the researchers have put to work so far. “In the next steps of the technology, we will incorporate the large numbers of robots which we have already shown is possible (over one thousand operating at once so far) into building processes,” explained Pelrine. “At that stage we’ll see large objects being built.” 

In addition to being able to build large objects, micro-robots can construct small structures like human tissue. Researchers are already looking into how to do this with 3D printers, but printers are brutish and ill-suited to the subtleties inherent in building the human body. SRI’s system could offer a more elegant solution.

“One advantage of the direct cell-by-cell assembly is that the micro-robots can be more gentle with the cells than inkjets, and they can orient the cells,” Perline said. They can also build intricate scaffolding to provide cells with the nutrients they need to stay alive while tissue is being constructed.

Perline estimates that beta machines will be ready to get to work in micro-factories in as little as two to four years. While many robot labourers currently in development like Rethink Robotics’ Baxter are human-sized, the future of manufacturing could very well be mini.