Abstract: The present invention provides a swarm manufacturing platform, based on a swarm 3D printing and assembly (SPA) platform as a model for future smart factories, consisting of thousands of IoT-based mobile robots performing different manufacturing operations with different end effectors (e.g., material deposition, energy deposition, pick and place, removal of materials, screw driving, etc.) and real-time monitoring. The swarm manufacturing platform transforms a 1-D factory into a 2-D factory with manufacturing robots that can move across the 2-D factory floor, work cooperatively with each other on the same production jobs, and re-configure in real-time (i.e., the manufacturing robots can be digitally controlled to move, re-group, calibrate, and work on a new job in real-time).