Siemens Immersive Design Challenge · Finalist · Realize Live 2026
An autonomous robot that automates 3D print farm post-processing: removing finished parts, cleaning build plates, and restarting prints, so a farm can run continuously without a person standing over it.
3D print farms stall on human bottlenecks. Every finished print needs someone to pull the part, clean the plate, and queue the next job. Overnight and weekend capacity goes unused because nobody is there to reset the machines.
RoboRowdy closes that loop. It monitors the farm, detects completed prints, removes parts from the build plate, preps the plate, and triggers the next print in the queue. The goal is simple: printers that never sit idle.
The robot runs on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano with six onboard cameras. AprilTag fiducial markers give it precise positioning relative to each printer, and SimplyPrint cloud integration lets it read job status and restart prints remotely. Structural components are 3D printed in carbon-fiber reinforced PLA and PETG, designed in Siemens NX.
| Subsystem | Implementation |
|---|---|
| Compute | NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano |
| Vision | Six onboard cameras + AprilTag fiducial positioning |
| Farm integration | SimplyPrint cloud API for job status and restart |
| Structure | 3D-printed PLA-CF and PETG-CF components |
| CAD | Siemens NX (parts, assemblies, digital twin geometry) |
| Simulation | Altair Inspire FEA + topology optimization, Simcenter 3D |
Off-the-shelf material libraries don't include carbon-fiber filament blends, so I built custom material cards from Bambu Lab datasheets for PLA-CF and PETG-CF. With accurate material properties in place, I ran FEA in Altair Inspire on load-bearing components, checking Von Mises stress, displacement, and Factor of Safety before anything was printed.
Topology optimization then stripped unnecessary mass from structural parts while holding the required stiffness, which matters when every printed gram adds print time and cost. In parallel, the team developed a digital twin of the robot in Siemens NX and Simcenter 3D, mirroring the closed-loop design-simulate-build workflow Siemens calls Xcelerator.
RoboRowdy reached the national finalist round of the Siemens Immersive Design Challenge. The team presented on stage at Realize Live Americas 2026 in Detroit, demonstrated the project in a Sony XR immersive design experience, and recorded a podcast series about the build with Siemens.
Getting there meant more than engineering: we crated and shipped roughly 350 pounds of robot and custom wooden crate across the country, coordinated with Siemens and UTSA communications teams, and told the story of an all-freshman team building something real.