Researchers at the public university Federal Polytechnic School (ETH) in Zurich have developed, in collaboration with an American startup called Inkbit , the first fully printed robot hand, with bones, ligaments and tendons. The device is a great advance in 3D printing technology and the usefulness it can have for prosthetics in medicine.
The field of robotic prosthesis research is very broad and increasingly offers better solutions for patients with amputated body parts, often related to 3D printing. In Spain, we have the recent example of Arm2u, a biomedical engineering team from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, which created a 3D prosthetic arm with artificial intelligence techniques to respond to nerve impulses. However, in this case, we go beyond our borders to talk about the invention of the ETH group.
Typically, 3D printers create objects layer by layer. That is, the machine's nozzles deposit a certain material in a viscous form at each point and, then, a UV lamp cures each layer, one by one. This method requires the use of a device that is responsible for scraping all surface irregularities after each cure.
On the other hand, the process used by these German researchers is different. According to what they say, the three-dimensional printing was equipped with a 3D laser scanner, capable of instantly checking each printed layer for irregularities. Thus, Experts point out that the machine takes these irregularities into account when printing the next layer and eliminates the part of the process where you had to smooth the layers by scraping them.