3D Print Farm Robots: From RepRap to ABB Cobots

A 3D print farm is a room of desktop printers run as one factory, with dozens or thousands of machines making the same toy or electronics case at once. This post follows the idea from the first open-source printers to the hand-run farms of the 2010s, the first robot arms that swapped build plates, and the Chinese farms that now run thousands of machines. Large format and metal printing have their own posts, so they are left out here. The last part looks at where ABB cobots and mobile robots could fit, and at the problems that still keep people walking between the printers.

The 3D printer farm at Hackerspace Wrocław: four Prusa MK3S+ and three Prusa MINI printers on shelves, April 2026. Photo: Majabojarska / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

How desktop printers turned into hand-run print farms

RepRap began at the University of Bath in 2005, when Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering, set out to build an open-source printer that could print many of its own parts. RepRap 0.2 printed its first part of itself on 13 September 2006. On 29 May 2008 the Darwin machine made a complete copy of its printed parts, which came to 48 percent of all its parts if fasteners are left out. In January 2009 Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer and Zach Smith founded MakerBot in New York to build on that work, and their Cupcake CNC kit went on sale in April 2009.

A RepRap Darwin, the self-replicating 3D printer, on a workbench in January 2008. Photo: Zach Hoeken / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Farms grew out of that demand. When kits sold faster than MakerBot could make them in 2009, the company asked owners to print parts for future machines on their own MakerBots. By March 2017 Voodoo Manufacturing in Brooklyn ran 160 printers as a factory. In 2021 Prusa Research kept 600 printers running around the clock at its headquarters in Prague, looked after by a whole team of farm operators. Each printer needed the same routine by hand: take the finished part off, clear the plate, load filament and start the next job.

A bot farm of MakerBot printers lined up on workbenches in June 2011, set up to turn out many prints within 24 hours. Photo: syvwlch / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Voodoo tried to hand that routine to a robot. Its Project Skywalker, shown in March 2017, was a robot arm serving a cluster of nine printers. It slid out a finished build plate, set it on a conveyor, took a fresh plate from a stack and pushed it in, and software told the printer to start again. On its first unattended night it ran for 14 hours. In 2021 Prusa showed a farm of 34 printers at Expo 2020 in Dubai, where a mechanical arm carried finished print sheets to a collecting bay. Formlabs launched Form Auto in January 2023 to remove finished parts and start the next print, and that October Mosaic Manufacturing began shipping Array, four printers with automatic bed changes.

A hand grips the build platform of a Formlabs Form 2 resin printer, 2015. Formlabs' later Form Auto removes finished parts and starts the next print without a person. Photo: Creative Tools / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0), cropped

Thousands of printers and the people who still run them

In August 2026 Michael Petch, editor of 3D Printing Industry, toured Huafast in Shenzhen, where 5,600 Bambu Lab printers are part of about 15,000 that its parent company bought for several sites. Founder Sven described a toy order of more than 50,000 pieces made in seven days on 1,000 to 2,000 printers, and 60,000 small industrial parts made in a week on 100 H2S machines. The Shenzhen site has 42 staff, more than 30 of them in production. One operator can look after about 300 printers when they all make the same item, but far fewer once 20 or more different files are running.

A Bambu Lab H2S desktop printer. Huafast put 100 of them on one order for 60,000 small parts. Photo: Andrew Kirk via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Most of the work between prints is still done by hand. Operators run the printers, insert filament and take off finished parts, and Sven said filament changes take a large share of their time. Huafast was testing automatic build plate collection on only two machines. A study by the consultancy AMPOWER, reported on 6 October, lists filament changes, part removal, inspection and packing as jobs people still usually do. Jinqi Toys changed the printers instead. It now runs about 2,300 Snapmaker U1 printers, whose four print heads switch colour in about 5 seconds, against roughly 120 on a single-head printer, and waste almost no filament. The company says multicolour products went from about 5 percent of its sales revenue to over 50 percent in under a year.

Bambu Lab printers with their filament spools lined up on glass shelves in a Bambu Lab shop at Shenzhen Bay MixC mall, May 2026. Photo: TWS LUOK Mingaowpuo / Wikimedia Commons (CC0), cropped

We found no ABB print farm project, so an ABB robot here is only a possibility. In 2018 Universal Robots described what a cobot can do in a printer farm: remove and replace build plates and sort finished parts for delivery. ABB lists machine tending among the jobs for its GoFa cobot, which comes in 5, 10 and 12 kg versions with up to 1.62 m of reach. Torque sensors in its joints limit the force when it touches a person, and ABB says it can work right next to people without fences. A GoFa beside a row of printers could do the plate swap that Voodoo's arm did in 2017.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot and a worker handling the same part at a work table. Photo: ABB

What the next print farms will need from robots

AMPOWER estimates that 5.2 million desktop printers were sold worldwide in 2025, up 34 percent from 3.88 million in 2024, and that China makes 94 percent of them. If sales grew about 30 percent a year, the study's moderate scenario, that would come to roughly 19.3 million a year by 2030. Some of the farms are in homes: Sven said small operators running farms from home with family labour were undercutting larger ones. Big farms also have to move plates, spools and boxes around. ABB's Flexley Mover P604 lifts and carries loads, builds its own maps to within 10 mm and shares them with other robots in its fleet.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604 mobile robot among pallets. It maps its surroundings with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

At Huafast the fleet ran at 50 to 60 percent of capacity on average, and Sven estimated that a printer pays for itself in six to eight months, or up to a year when prices fall. Depending on the file, 2.5 to 10 percent of jobs needed an operator or failed. Scale multiplies mistakes, because a wrong file, an unchanged setting or the wrong filament colour can be copied across hundreds of machines at once. Printers wear out as well: some at Huafast had passed 10,000 printing hours, and nozzles, extruder gears and belts are the usual spare parts. Wi-Fi interference means much of the fleet is still controlled by hand.

A desktop 3D printer laying down green parts in a workshop, May 2026. Photo: Shixart1985 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A cobot that works next to farm staff has to stop when it touches someone. ABB says GoFa is safety certified to Category 3, PL d, and staff can teach it positions by moving the arm by hand. Cells like this are usually planned and tested first in RobotStudio, where ABB says offline programs match the real robot up to 99 percent. Huafast's own priorities are material handling and collecting finished parts, and after that the parts still have to be checked and packed. Printing with the robot arm itself is a different job, covered in our post on large format 3D printing.

Programming an ABB SWIFTI cobot from a hand-held pendant at a work table. Photo: ABB

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