Technology Ventures' Inventor Spotlight: Wenchao Zhou

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Wenchao Zhou

"It's really exciting when you control something and it moves. You get instant feedback when you tell a robot to do something," explains Wenchao Zhou, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the U of A. "That's a great feeling."

Zhou is the director of the Advanced Manufacturing, Modeling and Materials Lab, where his research team is developing next-generation 3D printing technologies and promoting the technology's potential to create better lives. He believes the future of additive manufacturing, as 3D printing is often called, is personal fabrication — the use of 3D printing in homes and businesses to create custom products on demand. One of the biggest challenges to this is the time it takes for current devices to create products. Zhou's lab is researching a new additive manufacturing process that could increase the speed of this technology by a factor of 100 or more.

Zhou is also the cofounder of AMBOTS, a local startup company located in the Arkansas Research and Technology Park that is developing "swarm manufacturing technology" that utilizes multiple robots working cooperatively to build complex products. He is the company's chief technology officer and the primary inventor of AMBOTS' underlying technology, which was featured on Innovation Nation. AMBOTS has licensed several innovations from Technology Ventures that Zhou developed through his work at the U of A. These inventions provide the foundation on which AMBOTS is building its first commercial product.

As technically impressive as Zhou's work already is, it's only scratching the surface of what he sees coming: the dawn of the general-purpose factory. Currently, factories are built for specific purposes, whether that purpose is producing cars or iPhone components. This can make for long and complicated supply chains that can become overoptimized — an earthquake, hurricane or pandemic can disrupt an entire industry if it affects a key offshore factory. "It's also not favorable to the small guys," Zhou adds, as smaller businesses may not generate enough revenue to justify converting an entire factory to producing a particular component.

"It's very expensive to a build a factory for a specific product," Zhou explains, "and when a product goes away, like a floppy disk or CD, the factory faces the end of its life. With a general-purpose factory, you can fundamentally decouple the factory life from the product life. You can replace old robots with new robots; you can update the software, but the factory will never disappear."

If that sounds revolutionary, it's because it is. What Zhou envisions is nothing less than the elimination of the supply chain, save for basic materials, and the relocalization of factories. He envisions a new paradigm that is more efficient, sustainable, scalable and decentralized. In this scenario, AMBOTS is ultimately not in the business of selling robots or software designs for printing products, but versions of itself: a general-purpose factory that could be locally franchised to produce shoes, furniture or Jersey barriers.

It's a bold vision — even utopian — that Zhou believes will happen with or without AMBOTS, though he hopes the company can contribute to it happening.

Still, Zhou is realistic. He knows there is a lot of work to be done in developing a minimum set of robots that can work both autonomously and cooperatively to build increasingly complex things. And that might take more time than he has.

"If I can even see a glimpse of that becoming a reality before I die, that's okay," he said. "I will be happy."

He adds with a laugh, "I tend to dream more than I can do!"