r | p 2006: The Replicating Rapid-prototyper—Moving Hardware Through the Wires - Adrian Bowyer

This talk will be about RepRap—the replicating rapid prototyper. RepRap will be a desktop manufacturing system that is able to make the vast majority of its own component parts, so—if your friend has a RepRap machine—you can ask him or her to make you the parts for one too. RepRap will be open-source, and will be distributed under the GNU General Public Licence; so anyone can have one.
Once you have a RepRap, you will be able to download designs for a wide range of items—from coat-hooks to cameras—and have your RepRap machine make them. In doing this, you will have used no goods transport, exchanged no money, and avoided completely any industrial involvement. You will also be able to design and to make items yourself, and—optionally—to post those designs online under the GPL for the benefit of others.
RepRap has the potential to completely revolutionise manufacturing and wealth-creation for the entire world.

In the 1970s Adrian Bowyer read for a first degree in mechanical engineering at Imperial College, and then researched a PhD in tribology there. In 1977 he moved to Bath University's Maths Department to do research in stochastic computational geometry. He then founded the Bath University Microprocessor Unit in 1981 and ran that for four years. After that he took up a lectureship in manufacturing in Bath's Engineering Department, where he is now a senior lecturer.
His current areas of research are geometric modelling and geometric computing in general (he is one of the authors of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams), the application of computers to manufacturing, and biomimetics. His main work in biomimetics is on self-copying machines.