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Ok so in a nutshell they took a turtlebot and stuck a 3d printer on top of it. Crazy what qualifies as an IEEE article these days.

Wasn't there a working implementation of cooperative holonomic robots a few years back that each had a print head and they could print arbitrarily large parts by driving around instead of using a gantry for the xy axis? I'm trying to find the article but Google just swarms me with a quadrillion results of how to 3D print a mecanum robot so there's that.

Well, you could put a multi-axis robot arm with sufficient reach on top of the base, a counterweight on one arm (or more) and some laser interferometry to position the head very precisely in relation to the room, floor, walls, and printed article. Would be interesting to see it stretching the printer arm while counterbalancing it with the other arms like a ballerina.

> Printing designs larger than the robot is one of Campos Zamora’s goals in the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics

:)