Miniature Flexible & Reconfigurable Manufacturing System for 3D Micro-products

A shoebox-sized factory will assemble microscopic medical devices, optical components, and other high-value micro-products using a flexible, reconfigurable manufacturing system that can switch between products without retooling. Today, making tiny 3D objects—such as miniature surgical instruments, photonics components, or micro-sensors—requires dedicated production lines that are expensive to set up and inflexible. If a design changes, the entire line must be rebuilt. This project aims to create a single, compact manufacturing platform that combines parallel robots for handling and assembly, hybrid micromachining, embedded sensors for real-time quality control, and multiscale modelling to predict how materials behave at microscopic scales. If successful, the system would let UK manufacturers produce small batches of custom micro-products quickly and cheaply, without the capital cost of dedicated factories. This matters for medical instruments, where bespoke devices are increasingly needed, and for photonics and telecommunications, where components shrink while complexity rises. The consortium draws on established expertise from previous EPSRC and EU projects, and includes industrial partners from machine-tool, metrology, medical instrument, and photonics manufacturers—so the work is grounded in real production challenges. The research is applied, not fundamental: it builds directly toward a deployable manufacturing tool.