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To demonstrate their method, researchers 3-D printed a small hexapod robot that weighs about 1.5 pounds and is less than 6 inches long. To move, a single DC motor spins a crankshaft that pumps fluid to the robot’s legs. Aside from its motor and power supply, every component is printed in a single step with no assembly required.
Among the robot’s key parts are several set of “bellows” that are 3-D printed directly into its body. To propel the robot, the bellows uses fluid pressure that is then translated into a mechanical force. (As an alternative to the bellows, the team also demonstrated they could 3-D print a gear pump that can produce continuous fluid flow.)
Lastly, the team 3-D printed a silicone-rubber robotic hand with fluid-actuated fingers. This “soft gripper” was developed for Baxter, a robot that was designed by former CSAIL director Rodney Brooks as part of his spinoff company Rethink Robotics.
“The CSAIL team has taken multi-material printing to the next level by printing not just a combination of different polymers or a mixture of metals, but essentially a self-contained working hydraulic system,” says Hod Lipson, a professor of engineering at Columbia University and co-author of “Fabricated: The New World of 3-D Printing.” “It’s an important step towards the next big phase of 3-D printing — moving from printing passive parts to printing active integrated systems.”
Compatible with any multimaterial 3-D inkjet printer, “printable hydraulics” allows for a customizable design template that can create robots of different sizes, shapes and functions.
“If you have a crawling robot that you want to have step over something larger, you can tweak the design in a matter of minutes,” MacCurdy says. “In the future, the system will hardly need any human input at all; you can just press a few buttons, and it will automatically make the changes.”
MacCurdy envisions many potential applications, including disaster relief in dangerous environments. Many nuclear sites, for example, need to be remediated to reduce their radiation levels. Unfortunately, the sites are not only lethal to humans, but radioactive enough to destroy conventional electronics.
“Printable robots like these can be quickly, cheaply fabricated, with fewer electronic components than traditional robots,” MacCurdy says.
Looking ahead
The team is eager to further build on their work. While the hexapod’s 22-hour print-time is relatively short for its complexity, researchers say that future hardware advances would improve the speed.
“Accelerating the process depends less on the particulars of our technique, and more on the engineering and resolution of the printers themselves,” says Rus, the Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. “Printing ultimately takes as long as the printer takes, so as printers improve, so will the manufacturing capabilities.”
This isn’t Rus’ group’s first foray into 3-D printed robots. This past fall her team developed a similar gripper, while in 2014 they created an arm that can snake through a pipe and grasp an object. But where these projects still required multiple non-3-D printed objects, “printable hydraulics” gets even closer to printing all components in one step.
“Building robots doesn’t have to be as time-consuming and labor-intensive as it’s been in the past,” Rus says. “3-D printing offers a way forward, allowing us to automatically produce complex, functional, hydraulically-powered robots that can be put to immediate use.”
The team’s work was funded, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
