Can a blocking-aware correction to queueing analysis predict a robot-printer cell across loads?

What it found

A follow-up to the held-printer project: held demand plus a fitted stall (printers waiting for the arm to unload them) helps only at saturation (1.4% mean error) and double-counts load and unload time elsewhere (8.5%). A predictor that keeps latency (plain demand plus stall) apart from capacity (held demand plus stall) scores 3.6% against 4.7% for plain MVA on 32 design settings, but ties plain MVA on a held-out job mix (3.4% against 3.5%) and still underestimates by up to 8% at moderate load. Stylised; illustrative times; 20 seeds.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• White paper
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

More in Robot manufacturing loops

• Can a parallel-jaw arm assemble its own gripper?Can a parallel-jaw arm assemble its own toy gripper? A complete order exists only once the jaw opens to the widest part (30 mm); a top-down-only arm accepts 120 of 720 orderings against 384 with sideways moves; pad thickness changes nothing (negative). Stylised boxes.
• Can a printed gripper assemble its own next generation?Can a printed gripper assemble its own next generation? With fixed-size jaw pads a gripper builds a copy only at scale ≥ pad thickness in mm (4 mm pads: scale 4); a stroke cap of S mm needs 30·pad ≤ S; seeds of 130 and 140 mm sustain a chain, 60 and 100 mm decay. Largely algebraic given an assumed opening; stylised.
• How long an arm does it take to assemble its own toy gripper?How long an arm does it take to assemble its own toy gripper? A planar two-link arm needs 60–140 mm links as the tray moves 40–400 mm away, and a 90° elbow limit more than doubles it (stylised).
• Does the assembly order change the arm an arm needs to build its own gripper?Does the assembly order change the arm needed to build its own gripper? Across all 384 valid orders the shortest arm is identical in every setting tried (negative result, stylised).
• Can friction hold each printed part of a gripper?Can friction hold each printed part of the toy gripper? The simulated minimum jaw force matches the m·g/(2μ) bound to within 5% over 33 cases and is at most 0.1 N, so the jaw opening, not friction, is the constraint (stylised).
• Does arm torque or jaw friction limit how fast an arm carries a printed part?Does arm torque or jaw friction limit how fast an arm carries a printed part? With 0.12 m links and 5 N m the carries take 0.06–0.10 s and the cover needs 1.25 N per jaw (21× static); grip binds below about 0.5 N (stylised, bound extrapolated beyond 40 m/s²).

All 53 Robot manufacturing loops projects →

Other research topics

Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1

Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.