Prototyping the Impossible to Build the Smallest and Strongest Robots in the World

Building the FLX Bot

At this point in consumer 3D printing you can get quite good prints for less than $300. But this hasn’t always been the case. I used to hate 3D printing. My first experience was in undergrad with an industrial grade printer that never worked. By grad school, the lab I managed had a first generation consumer 3D printer whose steppers sang at the top of their lungs while poorly printing parts mere feet from my desk. Suffice it to say, it collected a lot of dust.

Fast forward to 2018. I bought my first modern hobbyist printer for $800 and it changed my life. It was silent and printed with more than sufficient tolerance for prototyping robots (and everything else). It just worked. Period.

At the time, I was finishing up as a professor at Lehigh University furthering the development of the snake-like robot I invented as my doctoral work. It was created for driving through walls to run wires without a mess. And was going to be a metal monster costing at least $15K.

But that new printer changed everything. I realized that I could leverage a 3D printing to prototype faster. This ultimately led to the mindset shift of creating affordable, mass-deployable snake-like robots for inspection and repair. And led to my current job as the Founder and CEO of FLX Solutions, Inc. 

FLX is disrupting the robotics industry with highly functional and intelligent robots that are miniaturized to operate in spaces that humans and traditional robots cannot easily access. Our first product, The FLX BOT is a patented, snake-like robot that is one inch in diameter and expands, braces, and climbs to perform many customizable actions. Our modular robot is made up of identical, interchangeable links that each have a camera and sensor to enable 3D mapping and autonomous navigation. Each robot has interchangeable end effectors including drills, grippers, vacuums or sprayers.

Finally Something New and Different

Being in the hardware startup world I’ve seen the 3D printing fad come and go. People at pitch competitions claim to have invented a new type of FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) printer that is really nothing new. I’ve also experienced the rise of SLA resin printing for consumers. While they can make very beautiful and even accurate parts, they seem to be used more for making figurines than engineering. At this point, it’s rare that I’m impressed by a new type of 3D printing technology. 

So as the founder of a robotics company making some of the smallest and strongest robots in the world, I’m constantly stuck figuring out how to prototype my parts. Especially the tiny ones. This meant having to transition some components to classical machining from printed prototypes because my consumer grade printers just can’t print them.

Enter Boston Micro Fabrication, the pioneer in high precision 3D printers. I met the BMF team at a trade show in NYC. When I saw the scale and detail of parts they had on display, my jaw dropped. Having spent a large portion of my mechanical engineering PhD attempting to machine parts to 1/10th of BMF’s capabilities I didn’t believe it was true. The parts must have been made some other way besides printing.