Rosotics Shifts Focus to Space Construction with HALO 3D Printing Technology

By on January 17th, 2025 in news, printer

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The HALO metal 3D printer [Source: Rosotics]

Rosotics is undertaking a major shift in strategy, and this could affect not only 3D printing, but our future in outer space.

The Arizona-based company developed a very large metal 3D printing system, Halo. When I say “large”, I really mean “gigantic”: the HALO Production System can build metal objects up to 9000kg in a 5000 x 5000 x 4840 mm build volume.

HALO 3D Print Technology

HALO uses a wire-based metal 3D printing technology that’s similar to WAAM and laser systems. However, there’s a big difference: instead of using electrical arc or lasers to apply heat to the wire, they use induction heating.

Induction heating requires significantly less energy than other methods, meaning the HALO can produce objects at substantially lower costs.

That’s not all: the HALO is able to partially self-assemble, as it includes robotic elements.

If this sounds quite amazing, it is. As such, it should be very attractive to industry or anyone that needs large metal parts.

Rosotics Strategy

Unfortunately, that was not the case. I spoke with Rosotics CEO Christian LaRosa, who explained that the company is undertaking a very significant strategy change. As part of the switch, they are relocating their HQ from Arizona to Florida.

LaRosa explained that while the technology works just fine, it turns out there just aren’t that many potential applications for enormously large metal parts. Sure, there are some, but the market is nowhere near as large as was expected. Part of this is because of the challenges in making large parts: there aren’t any because they are difficult to make.

LaRosa has identified a different path for the company, and it’s literally straight up.

Space Applications

LaRosa looked for a type of application that could leverage the large size, low energy capabilities of the HALO technology and at the same time be a huge and growing market. He chose space applications.

The idea is that in coming years there will likely be an explosion of business activity in space due to the dramatically lowered cost of rockets. Costs are lowering because of new innovations like SpaceX’s Starship and similar technologies in the works. In some years’ time, the cost to space will be low enough that many businesses will want to do a wide range of things in space.

To do that, they will need infrastructure, and that means construction. HALO technology is ideal for building large metal objects in space because the wire-based approach is compatible with the weightless environment, unlike powder 3D printing processes. Also, the low power requirement will be highly desirable because of constrained power sources in space: fewer solar cells are required to print a given amount of material.

You might be thinking that the HALO technology might be a bit small because surely space applications will require parts larger than 5m in length.

That’s where the second innovation comes in: cold welding.

Orbital Assembly Using Cold Welding

This will take a bit to explain. Imagine you have two pieces of steel. If you touch them together, you’ll likely hear a clink, but that’s about all that happens. This is because on Earth, the atmosphere is full of oxygen. That atmospheric oxygen reacts with the surface of the steel to produce an oxide layer.

The oxide layer is what stops the steel molecules from bonding together. In fact, this is why all metal objects don’t immediately join together.

Now let’s turn to the space environment.

Imagine you have a HALO-technology 3D printer in orbit. It accepts input wire material from the Earth and prints, say, several blocks of metal. Because the wire is extruded in a vacuum, there is no oxide layer present.

This means that if you touch the blocks together, they will naturally fuse, better than welding.

This has actually happened accidentally on spacecraft. In 1991, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft could not fully deploy its antenna because during movement, one piece welded to another. Since then, the notion of cold welding has been negative: NASA and other space developers attempt to avoid it from happening.

But what if you wanted it to happen?

What if you want to use cold welding as a means to build very large metal structures in space with no effort other than moving parts around?

A HALO-style device could rapidly produce a series of components that could be rapidly assembled into a massive structure merely by placing the parts together.

That’s the world where Rosotics is going, and why they located to Florida: they want to be close to the action where other space ventures might require their technology.

This means they will no longer be selling the HALO 3D printer in its current state, as they are fully directing their resources towards the space goals described above.

However, their induction technology is still quite interesting and could be used by others. Rosotics is developing some kind of licensing program in which other companies can make use of their unique induction heating technology.

It may be that some of the other manufacturers of wire-based metal 3D printing systems might want to adapt their technology to induction heating in order to save energy.

That could be good news for the metal 3D printing industry, as costs might be lowered. It’s also good news for Rosotics, as they embark on a journey unimaginable only a few years ago.

“Delivering factories on or off-world.”

Via Rosotics

By Kerry Stevenson

Kerry Stevenson, aka "General Fabb" has written over 8,000 stories on 3D printing at Fabbaloo since he launched the venture in 2007, with an intention to promote and grow the incredible technology of 3D printing across the world. So far, it seems to be working!