October 29, 2024
From accessibility upgrades to a custom cat-food bowl, a prototype mobile 3D printer is being used to change the built environment and tailor spaces for peoples’ needs or style preferences.
Built on a modified consumer vacuum robot, MobiPrint can automatically measure a room and print objects onto its floor to add accessibility features, home customizations, or artistic flourishes to the space. The prototype was built by a research team in the Makeability Lab. The team, led by CREATE Ph.D. student Daniel Campos Zamora and CREATE associate director Jon E. Froehlich, customized a graphic interface that lets users design objects that the robot has mapped out.
The team recently presented its work at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Pittsburgh (UIST). Read their research paper, MobiPrint: A Mobile 3D Printer for Environment-Scale Design and Fabrication.
Pushing 3D printers to do more
Today’s 3D printers make it fairly easy to fabricate a chess set, for example. But these printers are largely fixed in place. So if someone wants to add 3D-printed elements to a room — a footrest beneath a desk, for instance — the project gets more difficult. A space must be measured. The objects must then get scaled, printed elsewhere and fixed in the right spot. Handheld 3D printers exist, but they lack accuracy and come with a learning curve.
“How can we push [digital fabrication] further and further into the world, and lower the barriers for people to use it? How can we change the built environment and tailor spaces for peoples’ specific needs — for accessibility, for taste?”
–Daniel Campos Zamora, lead author and CREATE Ph.D. student in the Allen School
How it works
The prototype system can add accessibility features, such as tactile markers for blind and low-vision people. These might provide information, such as text telling conference attendees where to go, or warn of dangers such as staircases. Or it can create a ramp to cover an uneven flooring transition. MobiPrint also allows users to create custom objects, such as small art pieces up to three inches tall.
Before printing an object, MobiPrint autonomously roams an indoor space and uses LiDAR to map it. The team’s design tool then converts this map into an interactive canvas. The user then can select a model from the MobiPrint library — a cat food bowl, for instance — or upload a design. Next, the user picks a location on the map to print the object, working with the design interface to scale and position the job. Finally, the robot moves to the location and prints the object directly onto the floor.
For printing, the current design uses a bioplastic common in 3D printing called PLA. The researchers are working to have MobiPrint remove objects it’s printed and potentially recycle the plastic. They’re also interested in exploring the possibilities of robots that print on other surfaces (such as tabletops or walls), in other environments (such as outdoors), and with other materials (such as concrete).
“I think about kids out biking or my friends and family members who are in wheelchairs getting to the end of a sidewalk without a curb. It would be so great if in the future we could just send Daniel’s robot down the street and have it build a ramp.”
–Jon E. Froehlich, Director of the Makeability Lab
Liang He, an assistant professor at Purdue University, who was a doctoral student in the Allen School while doing this research, is a co-author on this paper.
This article was excerpted from the UW News article by Stefan Milne and the MobiPrint project page.