Robot Never Misses Leg Day

We have heard bipedal walking referred to as a series of controlled falls, or one continuous fall where we repeatedly catch ourselves, and it is a long way to fall at 9.8m/s2. Some of us are more graceful than others, but most grade-schoolers have gained superior proficiency in comparison to our most advanced bipedal robots. Legs involve all kinds of tricky joints which bend and twist and don’t get us started on knees. Folks at the Keio University and the University of Tokyo steered toward a robot which does not ride on wheels, treads, walk or tumble. The …read more

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Making Prints More Resilient With Fibre-Filled Filament

For all that we love 3D printers, sometimes the final print doesn’t turn out as durable as we might want it to be.

Aiming to mimic the properties of natural structures such as wood, bone, and shells, a research team lead by [Jennifer A. Lewis] at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ Lewis Lab have developed a new combined filament and printing technique which they call rotational 3D printing.

Minuscule fibres are mixed in with the epoxy filament and their controlled orientation within the print can reinforce the overall structure or specific points that will undergo …read more

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