Backyard Factory
Assembly Line
A backyard factory: How robots empower you to create your own products
Traditional machine shops have been in decline for years, especially in the US. In part, that’s due to the exporting of skills to other countries, and part is due to the rise of more modern technologies, like robotic-based fabrication. While robots have certainly transformed large factories, they are also making it possible to create very sophisticated production facilities in spare bedrooms, family garages, and backyard sheds. Most smaller-scale robotic manufacturing devices will fit on a desk, which is why we call this category desktop fabrication. In fact, most prosumer-level 3D printers will fit on the corner of a desk.
All told, in the seven years since ZDNET’s editor-in-chief encouraged me to start exploring 3D printing, I’ve designed and built 176 projects. Obviously, we don’t have time to survey them all, so we’ll look briefly at some of my favorites and show how each of the robots helped make them possible, starting with 3D printers.
🦾 How to Make a Cost-effective Flexible Robotic Solution for Low-volume Production
Despite its process flexibility, the unified cell is still a production system that requires a level of investment that might not be the best suited for scenarios where one wants to produce short production runs of products that don’t share common applications (e.g. joining equipment) therefore require reconfiguration of its applications for every production run. To address this problem, we need a production system that can be reconfigured with multiple process capabilities while reusing as much equipment as possible to allow good utilisation of investment-heavy resources while meeting the machine safety directives and technical requirements.
By lessening the complexity of the hardware architecture, we can significantly increase the capabilities and ways of using the equipment that makes it financially efficient even for low-volume tasks. Moreover, the further development of the solution can be mostly in the software part, which is easier, faster and cheaper than hardware R&D. Having “chipset” architecture allows us to start using AI algorithms - a huge prospective.