170 Robotic Large-Format 3D Printing Practitioners Met in the Netherlands

A new gathering for robotic large-format printing

The inaugural Addidex Connect event drew roughly 170 practitioners in robotic large-format additive manufacturing (LFAM) to the 3D Makers Zone in Haarlem, the Netherlands, on June 30 and July 1, 2026. It was the first time this corner of the industry had a room of its own.

Robotic LFAM sits at the messy intersection of industrial robots, pellet extruders, materials science, and software. The people building it tend to work in silos. Addidex, a platform for the field, put the first edition together to pull those silos into one conversation.

What the attendees actually talked about

The recurring theme across two days was blunt: progress here depends less on better machines and more on better alignment. Design intent, material behavior, toolpath generation, sensing, software, and production each move on their own track. Until they line up, a process that works in the lab can fall apart on the factory floor.

Founding partners CEAD, MX3D, and 3D Makers Zone backed the event, with strategic support from Caracol AM, Polymaker, and FibeCycle. Selected session recordings are expected on the Addidex platform and YouTube over the coming months.

The fragmentation problem is real

One persistent bottleneck in robotic LFAM is integrating design, material, toolpath, and process control into something a production line can repeat. CEAD addressed part of that gap through its partnership with Polymaker, which brings validated materials to its platforms and pulls machine and material development closer together.

Caracol AM and LaMáquina opened a shared robotic AM hub in Milan with Designtech, giving designers standing access to large-format robotic fabrication instead of a project-by-project scramble. That kind of permanent access, rather than one-off collaborations, is what the field keeps circling back to.

What comes next

Pre-registration for the 2027 edition, scheduled for July 22 and 23, is already open. The signal from this first event is that robotic LFAM is done proving the hardware works and now wants to prove it can scale. That means more talk about failure, qualification, and repeatability, and less about headline-grabbing print sizes.

For a discipline that has spent years showing off what a single robot arm can extrude, a conference about getting everyone on the same page is a sign the technology is growing up.