Goals
The stated goal of the RepRap project is to produce a pure self-replicating device not for its own sake, but rather to put in the hands of individuals anywhere on the planet, for a minimal outlay of capital, a desktop manufacturing system that would enable the individual to manufacture many of the artifacts used in everyday life. From a theoretical viewpoint, the project is attempting to prove the hypothesis that "Rapid prototyping and direct writing technologies are sufficiently versatile to allow them to be used to make a von Neumann Universal Constructor".
The self-replicating nature of RepRap could also facilitate its viral dissemination and may well facilitate a major paradigm shift in the design and manufacture of consumer products from one of factory production of patented products to one of personal production of un-patented products with open specifications. Opening up product design and manufacturing capabilities to the individual should greatly reduce the cycle time for improvements to products and support a far larger diversity of niche products than the factory production run size can support.
Read more about this topic: Rep Rap Project
Famous quotes containing the word goals:
“We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that “all of our problems” come from such goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)