A plastic Wall-E

RepRap Morgan was recently awarded the Gada prize, which was the first time I had seen a “SCARA arm”1 robot.2 Reading Hackaday lead me to read about RepRap Wally, another SCARA based robot.3 Anyhow, My favorite part about this robot is that it boasts it can print parts for larger versions of itself.

While building more 3D printers is, perhaps, a noble goal – democratizing production and all that – actually working to churn out parts is a dull business.  On the other hand, the idea of a robot capable of building increasingly larger iterations of itself is incredibly amusing.  As is the idea that a robot could build smaller and smaller versions of itself.4

Of course, this then makes me think of a chain of robots – one set making ever larger and another set making ever smaller robots… robots all the way down.

1. Yes, I know that’s redundant [↩]
2. Photo courtesy of Haceme un 14 [↩]
3. Watching this orange plastic robot in action, it’s easy to imagine they gave it the name “Wally” for looking somewhat similar to Disney’s Wall-E. [↩]
4. Of course, smaller versions would really only be more useful if they printed with greater precision [↩]