3D-Printed Soft Robotic Hand with Synthetic Anatomy

Regular 3D printers use quick-drying plastics that harden fast with UV lamps. They layer the plastic through a nozzle and use a tool to smooth out the surface.

This method works well, but it makes the product less flexible. If you want to use slow-drying materials like epoxies and thiolenes, it messes up the machine, and you have to make soft robotic parts differently.

So, some designers thought, “What if we use scanning tech and adjust the printing quickly to handle the slow-drying stuff?” In their new paper in Nature, they not only found a solution but also showed that slow-drying materials can be used for many designs with their 3D-printing system.

Instead of fixing surface issues layer by layer, 3D scanning quickly spots any problems on the object’s surface. This information goes to the printer’s feedback system, which adjusts the material amount in real-time and with great precision. Wojciech Matusik, a professor at MIT and one of the study’s authors, explained this in a recent profile from ETH Zurich.

To show what their new method can do, the researchers made four different 3D-printed projects using materials that dry slowly. They created a tough cube, a pump that works like a heart, a robot with six legs and a sensor-based gripper, and a hand that can grab things using built-in sensors.

Even though they still need to make improvements in how they produce things, the types of materials they use, and how long the objects last, the team thinks this 3D-printing method could be quick and flexible, leading to new designs in industry, architecture, and robotics.

Soft robots, in particular, are safer to work with humans and handle delicate items better than the usual metal robots. Already, their advances have allowed them to designs that were impossible with regular 3D printers.