Robot Arm Helps You 3D Print By "Guided Hand"

As cool as those handheld 3D printing pens are, you have to have some amount of talent (or at least practice) in order to make anything that's much more recognizable than a mangled three-dimensional squiggle. A proper 3D printer is basically one of those 3D printing pens stapled to a robot that can move it in three axes and do a much better job making things that look nice and function well, but it doesn't allow for much artistic participation from you. For some people, that's the point, but if you'd like to be more directly involved, Yeliz Karadayi's thesis project, called "Guided Hand," is a 3D printing pen with a haptic interface that helps keep you from screwing things up too badly. These haptic interfaces are basically little robot arms, although you can produce the same effect with robot arms of any size). It's hard to explain how it feels to use one of these things, and the experience doesn't come through very well on video, but basically, the end of the arm (being a robot) knows exactly where it is in 3D space, which means it can tell whether it is about to intersect a virtual 3D object or not.