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Robot is 3D-printed upside-down in one piece, then walks out of the printer

While there are many potential uses for soft-bodied robots, the things are still typically only built in small experimental batches. Scottish scientists are out to change that, with a mass-production-capable soft bot that is 3D-printed in a single piece which then walks off of the print bed.

That material starts out as a filament which is heated to the melting point, then extruded out of a print nozzle to build up the robot's body in successive layers. The bot is then hooked up to a device known as a pneumatic ring oscillator, which delivers a pulsating 2.25-bar (32.6-psi) air current into channels within the robot's body. "Using our new platform, anyone can now easily print things which were previously thought to be impossible," says University of Edinburgh engineer Maks Gepner, who led the study along with Prof. Adam A. Stokes.

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