A Six Degree of Freedom Extrusion Bioprinter

Abstract

Motivated by a high demand, the research interest in personalized artificial tissues is steadily increasing. Combining knowledge of additive manufacturing and tissue engineering, the research field of 3D bioprinting emerged. This work presents a six-degree-of-freedom mechanically actuated extrusion bioprinter within a sterile working environment. The system is based on an off-the-shelf robot arm and a custom modular printhead end-effector. Advanced dexterity is achieved by the six degrees of freedom, enabling printing on non-planar surfaces. The printhead is designed for co-axial extrusion of three fluids but can easily be adapted for different number of fluids or different extrusion flows. The custom controller of the system is implemented within the Robot Operating System (ROS) framework and plans the trajectory based on a path given in a custom GCode dialect. Since the robot is clean-room-certified, can be sterilized using hydrogen peroxide steam, and is placed within a sterile hood, the setup enables working under sterile conditions.