But if humans and robots can’t do the trick, what about 3-D printers?
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Computer scientists at MIT developed the hydraulically-powered robot to be created in a single step on a commercially available 3D-printer.
Termed “printable hydraulics” by the research team, the method “is a step towards the rapid fabrication of functional machines”, said Daniela Rus, CSAIL’s director, in a statement.
Most approaches to printing liquids have required additional post-printing steps such as manual cleaning, making the liquid step tricky to include in factory-scale manufacturing.
Rus and her team used a 3-D inkjet printer to build the layers of the hexapod robot, depositing droplets of material roughly half the width of a human hair. The printer proceeds layer-by-layer from the bottom up. A high-intensity UV light would then solidify what needed to be solid while leaving the liquids as they were. It describes how they hacked a 3D printer to accept fluid as a working material by replacing a built-in RFID chip for what is basically the printer’s cleaning fluid with a chip that identifies the liquid as a printable material.
“Inkjet printing lets us have eight different print-heads deposit different materials adjacent to one another, all at the same time”, MacCurdy says. The result was the 3D printing of complex pre-filled fluidic channels. UV light solidified the intended materials but did not impact on those that were meant to remain in a liquid form.
The MIT researchers had to create a “hack” to get a Stratasys 3D printer to use 3D printing technology to print both solid and liquid elements of the robots simultaneously.
McCurdy added that he believed using an inkjet printer was “currently the best way to print multiple materials”. It weighs about 1.5 pounds (680 grams) and is less than 6 inches (15 centimeters) long. Locomotion is achieved by a single DC motor that spins a crankshaft, which pumps fluid into the stilt-like legs. Aside from its motor and power supply, every component is printed in a single step, with no assembly required.
There are still some challenges to work through as the paper notes that this printing technique sacrifices strength, lifetime fatigue and even the overall resolution of parts. In an MIT article he said that the development would start “moving from printing passive parts to printing active integrated systems”.
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However, the group clarifies that the printed robots are affected by the limitations of the printer – namely the polymer used in the printing process, and so sacrifice mechanical strength.
