Additive Manufacturing Applications on Flexible Actuators for Active Orthoses and Medical Devices

Abstract

This paper describes the results of research projects developed at the University of L’Aquila by the research group of the authors in the field of biomedical engineering, which have seen an important use of additive manufacturing technologies in the prototyping step and, in some cases, also for the realization of preindustrialization prototypes. For these projects, commercial 3D printers and technologies such as fused deposition modelling (FDM) were used; the most commonly used polymers in these technologies are acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and polylactic acid (PLA). The research projects concern the development of innovative actuators, such as pneumatic muscles and soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs), the development of active orthoses, such as a lower limb orthosis and, finally, the development of a variable-stiffness grasper to be used in natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (NOTES). The main aspects of these research projects are described in the paper, highlighting the technologies used such as the finite element analysis and additive manufacturing.

Two-Dof Upper Limb Rehabilitation Robot Driven by Straight Fibers Pneumatic Muscles

“…As the number of applications useful in normal daily life grows, the need for integration in domestic environments and the need for safety in the interaction between man and machine grows as well. In this context, in recent years, collaborative robots and soft robotics have received a lot of attention, which meet these needs not only in biomedical and industrial fields, but also in the field of exploration and cooperative human assistance [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ].…”