In the 1936 film Modern Times , Charlie Chaplin plays a factory worker whose only job is to tighten two bolts—again and again, all day, until he finally goes mad. It’s the life of his robot descendants, which might, for example, weld the same car part over and over again. That model is reaching its own breaking point, says German industrial giant Siemens, because it’s too clunky to keep up with market demands.

“We’re going to see more complex products that consumers or different industries want us to manufacture,” says Livio Dalloro, head of research for Siemens Corporate Technology. “The costs to bring [an assembly line] up and then essentially bring this down, when you are going to be switching to a different product, are pretty high.” In other words, the costs of reconfiguring a traditional production line for a new product get in the way of being able to quickly iterate on product design.

Siemens Robotics Lab; Livio Dalloro and Sinan Bank with their spider bots. Photo: courtesy of Siemens

Siemen’s solution: a swarm of general-purpose worker robots that can be assigned a task and then figure out among themselves how to get it done. Dalloro’s team at Siemens’s lab in Princeton, New Jersey, has built spider-like 3-D printers that crawl around as a coordinated team. Looking like an arachnid Wall-E wearing a fez, each bot has a head with a 3-D depth-sensing camera similar to an Xbox Kinect. On top of that is an infrared laser scanner to further gauge the surroundings. Off-the-shelf circuit boards running Linux on multicore CPUs handle tasks like analyzing the immediate terrain. The spiders chat over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, reporting how much ground each can cover so that their collective mind can break up the job and assign out portions of it.

Dalloro gives an example of how the system, called SISPIs (Siemens Spiders), might eventually tackle a project. “This part essentially comes out of a . . . 3-D drawing, and this gets communicated to the robots,” he says. “And the robots essentially receive all the same information, and they negotiate with each other . . . who will manufacture each part and how to split the execution . . . in a parallel fashion.”

The spiders know their capabilities and limitations. Each is fitted with three gyroscopes and accelerometers, plus actuators in the legs that measure force—all in order to determine the spider’s position and how it is moving from one spot to the next. The team can even figure out how to cover for a robot if it breaks down or its battery dies.

Siemens’ ultimate goal is not to deploy an army of plastic-spraying 3-D-printing robots. SISPIs are a proof of concept demonstrating that a flexible, autonomous robot team is possible—an idea first proposed by Siemens engineer Sinan Bank in 2014. “We wanted to do it as quick and dirty and fast as possible,” says Dalloro. In a video showing one of the robots in action, the bot stomps around tentatively like a newborn foal still finding its (six) legs. “This is the first step for us,” Dalloro says, calling the overall project a moonshot. “This allows us to accelerate and develop a variety of different technologies in multiple disciplines at the same time,” he says.

“This is the first step for us.”

One challenge, obvious from the prototype, is to make the robots more graceful. Bank and Dalloro will use machine learning to analyze how the robots move and figure out better ways to do it. Not all future robots might move like spiders.