Building of Inmoov Robotic Arm for Performing Various Operations

‘Automation is the key in reducing the repetitive and banal tasks of everyday life’, the oft-quoted aphorism best portrays our effort at making a humanoid hand for tasks that require dexterity of fingers in situations where time and effort are of importance. The cost of human labor, quality of processes or products, time, and safety make this project a need of the hour. The research paper showcases our efforts of making a humanoid robotic arm. The body of the arm is composed of 3D printed parts. Servo Motors with nylon strings were used to control the fingers and the wrist. InMoov Nervo Board was used to control the servos. Worm Gear Mechanism was implemented to control the bicep movement and Worm Wheel is used for shoulder rotation. Machines can perform a wide range of functions without a considerable amount of human intervention. The future scope of Robotics and Automation would be to make a diverse and positive impact in industrial as well as research applications. Keywords: 3D Print, Build Challenges, Electronics, Humanoid, Inmoov, MyRobotLab, Robotic Arm, Robotics

Flexible Material Formulations for 3D Printing of Porous Beds with Applications in Bioprocess Engineering

Background: 3D printing is revolutionizing many industrial sectors and has the potential to enhance also the biotechnology and bioprocessing fields. Here, we propose a new flexible material formulation to 3D print support matrices with complex, perfectly ordered morphology and with tuneable properties to suit a range of applications in bioprocess engineering. Findings: Supports for packed-bed operations were fabricated using functional monomers as the key ingredients, enabling matrices with bespoke chemistry such as charged groups, chemical moieties for further functionalization, and hydrophobic/hydrophilic groups. Other ingredients, e.g. crosslinkers and porogens, provide the opportunity to further tune the mechanical properties of the supports and the morphology of their porous network. Through this approach, we fabricated and demonstrated the operation of Schoen gyroid columns with I) positive and negative charges for ion-exchange chromatography, II) enzyme bioreactors with immobilized trypsin to catalyse hydrolysis, and III) bacterial biofilms bioreactors for fuel desulfurization. Conclusions: This study demonstrates a simple, cost-effective and flexible fabrication of customized 3D printed supports for different biotechnology and bioengineering applications.

Towards an intelligent personal assistant for hearing impaired people

This work has been focused on the part of the population with hearing impairment who owns a dog and that worries about not listening the dog barks, specially when a risky situation is taking place at home. A survey was carried out on people with deafness problems to find out hazard situations which they are exposed at home. A system prototype was developed to be integrated as a component of ambient intelligence (AmI) for ambient assisted living (AAL) that serves to Hearing Impaired People (HIP). The prototype detects dog barks and notifies users through both a smart mobile app and a visual feedback. It consists of a connection between a Raspberry Pi 3 card and a ReSpeaker Mic Array v2.0 microphone array; a communication module with a smartphone was implemented, which displays written messages or vibrations when receiving notifications. The cylinder-shaped device was designed by the authors and sent it to 3D print with a resin material. The prototype recognized the barking efficiently by using a machine learning model based on Support Vector Machine technique. The prototype was tested with deaf people which were satisfied with precision, signal intensity, and activation of lights.

Recent Patents on Mechanical Structure of 3D Printer

Background: 3D printing technology is widely applied in transportation, industrial equipment, medical, aerospace, and civil industry due to its characteristics of material saving, no model manufacturing, and machinability of complex parts. The mechanical structure of 3D printer mainly includes 3D printer head structure and working platform and plays a major role in the machining efficiency and processing accuracy of the 3D printer. Thus, increasingly attention has been paid to the current trends of the mechanical structure of 3D printers. Objective: To meet the increasing requirements of 3D printing processing efficiency and precision, the mechanical structure of 3D printers, such as 3D print head structure and working platform, needs to be carefully studied, and a feasible mechanical structure of 3D printers should be proposed. Methods: This paper studies various representative patent related to the mechanical structure of 3D printer, analyzes the mechanical structure of 3D printer, and studies the perfect mechanical structure of 3D printer. Results: Through summarizing a lot of patents about the mechanical structure of 3D printers, the main current existing problems such as platform jitter and machining error are summarized and analyzed, a new mechanical structure of 3D printers is proposed. Moreover, the development tendency of the mechanical structure of 3D printers in the future is discussed. Conclusion: The optimization of the mechanical structure of 3D printer is conducive to increasing the machining efficiency and processing accuracy in the 3D printing process. More relevant patents about working platform and 3D printer head will be invented in the future

Projection Micro Stereolithography (PµSL) to 3D Print a Micro-Optofluidic Device for Two-Phase Slug Flow Detection: a Comparison with a PDMS-Based Device Manufactured by Resin Casting

In this work, the use of Projection Micro Stereolithography (PmSL) to 3D print a micro-optofluidic device for two-phase slug flow detection is presented. For comparison purposes a PDMS based device obtained by casting was also manufactured. The micro-optofluidic device has a microfluidic T-junction with a micro-optical section that consists of two optical fiber insertions used for two-phase slug flow detection. The working principle in the detection is based on a different light transmission correlated to the fluid interfering with the laser beam in a micro-channel section. The 3D printed material is fully characterized in terms of its surface properties and compared to PDMS used for standard construction using a master-slave casting procedure. The two devices were tested after the setup parameters for the detection were optimized using ANOVA for the 3D printed device. The comparisons of the two devices revealed that 3D printed device can be used for two-phase slug flow detection but future research is still need to obtain a 3D printed resin allowing to outperform PDMS.

Enabling complex fibre geometries using 3D printed axon-mimetic phantoms

PurposeTo introduce a method to create 3D-printed axon-mimetic phantoms with complex fibre orientations to characterize the performance of diffusion MRI models and representations in the presence of orientation dispersion.MethodsAn extension to an open source 3D printing package was created to 3D print a set of five 3D-printed axon-mimetic (3AM) phantoms with various combinations of bending and crossing fibre orientations. A two-shell diffusion MRI scan of the five phantoms in water was performed at 9.4T. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI), the ball and stick model, neurite orientation density and dispersion imaging (NODDI), and Bingham-NODDI were all fit to the resulting diffusion MRI data. A fiducial in each phantom was used to register a ground truth map of that phantom’s crossing angles and/or arc radius to the diffusion-weighted images. Metrics from each model and representation were compared to the ground-truth maps, and a quadratic regression model was fit to each combination of output metric and ground-truth metric.ResultsThe mean diffusivity (MD) metric defined by DTI was insensitive to crossing angle, but increased with fibre curvature. Axial diffusivity (AD) decreased sharply with increasing crossing angle. DKI’s diffusivity metrics replicated the trends seen in DTI, and its mean kurtosis (MK) metric, decreased with fibre curvature, except in regions with high crossing angles. The estimated stick volume fraction in the ball and stick model decreased with increasing fibre curvature and crossing angle. NODDI’s intra-neurite volume fraction was insensitive to crossing angle, and its orientation dispersion index (ODI) was strongly correlated to crossing angle. Bingham-NODDI’s intra-neurite volume fraction was also insensitive to crossing angle, while its primary ODI (ODIP) was also strongly correlated to crossing angle and its secondary ODI (ODIS) was insensitive to crossing angle. For both NODDI models, the volume fractions of the extra-neurite and CSF compartments had low reliability with no clear relationship to crossing angle.ConclusionsThis study demonstrates that inexpensive 3D-printed axon-mimetic phantoms can be used to investigate the effect of fibre curvature and crossings on diffusion MRI representations and models of diffusion signal. As a proof of concept, the dependence of several representations and models on fibre dispersion/crossing were investigated. As expected, Bingham-NODDI was best able to characterize planar fibre dispersion in the phantoms.

Fabrication and characterization of 3D printing scaffold technology by extract oils from plant and its applications in the cardiovascular blood

Extract oils from plants used in 3D polysaccharides modified with natural protein polymer modified polymer scaffolds can help to reduce blood pressure. This study aimed to use extract oils from plant (EOP)as blood pressure-reducing, bind them to magnetic iron nanoparticles (Fe3O4@NPs), then bind them to polymeric 3D print scaffolds [chitosan, polylactic acid, and polyurethane (CS/PLA/PU), modified with natural protein and finally separate them. This method made it possible to investigate different variables for nanoparticles. In this project, synthesis polymer, modified gelatin (Mo-Ge), PEGylation, extract oils from plant loading and release process in nanocarrier with different concentrations were examined and cell proliferation was optimized. The results show that 75% of the extract oils from plant loaded on iron magnetic nanoparticles containing PEGylated polymer scaffolds was released. Cell proliferation was performed for the sample. In this process, modification of scaffolding with polysaccharides modified with natural protein and extract oils from plant increased the efficiency of nanoparticles among the studied Allium sativum and Zingiber officinale. The size of A. sativum and Z. officinale were 29.833 nm and 150.02 nm size, respectively. These behaved very similarly to each other and A. sativum had the biggest effect in lowering blood pressure. The application of extract oils from plant in 3D mode scaffolding has not been studied before and this is the first analysis to do so, using nanoparticles.