This Robot Arm Will Try To 3D Print Its Way Over a Canal

And once it's done, it'll leave a footbridge behind

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MX3D is a robot arm that can 3D print free-standing metal structures. Cool right? You bet, but what do you do with it. If you're its creator Joris Laarman, you set it to work building itself a metal bridge across a canal all by itself.

In 2017, the MX3D is going to do just that, or at least it is going to try. With the help of software smarts from Autodesk, the robot should be able to slowly build a free-standing bridge that can hold the arm up while it continues to print. The idea is that the process would look a little something like this:

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While the tech already works at a very basic level (the machine can print metal) there are more challenges when it's building a bridge on its own. If there's some sort of fluke and the print gets warped, the MX3D will have to be able to recognize that and control for it in order to make sure the rest of the bridge doesn't end up all weird and borked.

Once the team settles on a specific location (right now it's just "somewhere in Amsterdam"), the process will take around two months and will hopefully leave behind a footbridge that non-3D-printing humans can use. If it works, it could be a game-changer for construction. This is not quite an instant holo-bridge or anything, but the promise of robots that can build simple infrastructure all on their own is promising.

And if it doesn't work? Laarman will just have to build his own bridge to get over it.

Source: Co.Design

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