So in this video, we look at some of leading edge applications of 3D printing.
First off, I think most of you would have seen this in
the first course with Professor Ali Kranfridge, as well.
He talks about 3D printing a wrench in space.
The firm made in space incorporated put up a 3D printer on the space station,
you have to be careful about the lack of gravity and how the filament or
the excursion material will work with zero gravity.
They're printing some replacement parts in space, but
there's an interesting project called Archinot.
Which involves building a robotic 3D printer
that can autonomously 3D print a portion of a structure in orbit.
Grab on to non-3D printed parts from orbit, and
assemble all of them to construct large and complex space structures.
This is still in planning, so this is about four or
five years out into actually getting any results from this project.
But that's an interesting vision, and you can think of potentially creating
structures to inhabit the moon, and maybe one day, go to Mars, as well.
Another interesting trend that's sort of highlights what is possible,
is 3D printing completely functional objects.
Now, one of the developments, which is a desktop printer currently priced at about
$8,000, is called the Voxel.
It's a multi-material 3D printer, and
it can print plastic as traditional FDM machine, and
conduct them in together to create circuits while the part is being printed.
At the end of the print, you'll have a fully functional product.
All you need is a chip in there to make the parts work with some
cord that you put in it.
Another interesting example is developed by a team at MIT,
were they hacked a commercially available 3D printer to print it.
A robot body with both solids and liquids.
And they created a hydraulic robot.
Of course, they still did need to put in a battery sensor and a computing unit,
but we already have technology being developed to 3D print batteries.
And there are firms in the space who are now printing, for example, the antenna for
your iPhone is being printed on the board itself with liquid conductive inks.
The time is not far, well,
maybe we will be printing robots that are functional off the printer itself.
So, a revolutionary concept in navigation is one of digital materials.
A term coined by Neil Gershenfeld in 2005.
And you heard about this in the discussion with Professor Hard Libson
in the previous course with Professor Alex Rindfish.
And the vision for digital materials is to allow for the creation of a 3D
assembler, which can work at a very tiny scale in our molecular,
or at the nano scale and assemble products in three dimensions.