This article is part of a series:
12 Amazing New Technologies To Check Out This Year
Robert Flitsch, inventor of the Addibot, wants to fix potholes on city streets. In the near future, your local public works department might end up using this small, multi-wheeled robot to help repair those nasty holes your bikes and cars plop over, damaging your wheels and axles. It works by creating layer over layer, the same way desktop 3D printers works, and can steer itself or be driven via a remote control console. Popular Science reports,
“One of the main limitations with 3D printers is you typically have it printing inside this box, and you can really only print objects of the size of the workspace you’re printing in,” says the 22-year-old Flitsch, a mechanical engineer who graduated from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences last May. “If you take additive manufacturing implements and make them mobile, you can print objects of arbitrary size.”
What’s great about this invention is that it is designed to repair a variety of surfaces with its array of nozzles. The tar chemicals are kept on-board in a heated container, and could be powered by sunlight and/or battery.
|
NEXT
2 of 13 |