This tiny mobile robot printer drives around sheets of paper to print stuff

Everything’s gone mobile, right? So why not printers too. That’s the logic behind this new Kickstarter project, the Mini Mobile Robotic Printer by Zuta Labs. It’s a tiny portable wireless printer that you place on your desk, sit back and watch as it drives across a piece of paper, leaving behind neat typography, designs or whatever you’d like to print.

Projects like these usually require some serious out-of-the-box thinking. “Print machines now-a-days are essentially a printhead running left and right on a moving piece of paper,” the team explains on its project page. “We asked ourselves — why not get rid of the entire device, just put the printhead on a set of small wheels and let it run across a piece of paper.”

The Mini Mobile Robotic Printer carries a battery that recharges via USB but can connect to your PC or smartphone wirelessly and can print on any size of paper. It currently works with Android, iOS, Linux, OSX and Windows.

The little robot is 10cm high and 11.5cm in diameter and weighs about 300g. It uses an omni-wheel system that allows it to accurately turn and drive in any direction as long as you properly place it at the top of the page.

It’s not without fault however. The inkjet, which for now is grayscale-only, lasts for more than 1 000 printed pages and the battery works for more than one hour per full-charge.

Although it prints more than 1 000 pages, you’ll still have to manually pick it up and place it on the next sheet of paper every time you want a new page. So it’s obviously not ideal for enterprise office solutions, but remains an awesome gadget nonetheless.

Since launching earlier this week, the project has received almost half of its required funding and is currently sitting just shy of US$200 000.