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ADDITIVE MANAUFACTURING
Sentient Bionics gets a helping hand from the AM Hub When Sentient Bionics required rapid production of prototype parts for its new robotic hand project, it turned to AMTIL’s Additive Manufacturing Hub (AM Hub) for assistance. Based in Port Melbourne, Sentient Bionics has been developing anthropomorphic robotic grippers for more than half a decade. During that time the company has worked with prosthetic users, hospitals and industry partners to develop a range of grippers suitable to satisfy everyday human and robotic needs. Familiarity, versatility and affordability are at the core of Sentient Bionics’s ethos, and it has developed hands that allow people and robots to interact in a natural and effective way. Additive manufacturing has already been a large part of Sentient’s business, giving it the ability to quickly prototype both adult and child-sized prosthetic mechanical hands. Additive manufacturing’s fast development time has allowed Sentient Bionics to start clinical trials and quickly respond to feedback gained through them with helpful and progressive design changes. While Sentient Bionics specialises in the design and assembly of technology and devices, it has outsourced the manufacturing of components. Although it has some basic desktop fused deposition modelling (FDM) printers in-house, which it uses for rapid prototyping operations, the company gets all the parts that it uses for testing and consumer-level products made professionally by additive manufacturing (AM) service providers.
several prototype parts to be manufactured quickly so they could be tested and altered according to results, and additive manufacturing was chosen as the primary method of manufacture.
The solution Sentient Bionics received manufacturing services from two Victorian companies – GoProto (ANZ) Pty Ltd and Objective 3D Pty Ltd – within the scope of its BiB voucher, which covered 50% of the service costs.
The challenge
AM Hub member GoProto was engaged for a range of additive manufacturing services including:
Sentient Bionics accessed the Build It Better (BiB) voucher programme via the Additive Manufacturing Hub (AM Hub) to assist it in initiating a new robotic hand project, as well enhancing the continuation of its prosthetic hand product line. Sentient Bionic’s dynamic design process required
• Manufacturing structural and functional parts designed by Sentient Bionics for the robotic and prosthetic hands, including the palm (front and back), internal mechanism and phalanges, using GoProto’s HP Multi-jet Fusion Printing capabilities.
• Manufacturing various other parts designed by Sentient Bionics required for internally used tools and rigs, as well as parts for several smaller side projects of Sentient Bionics as part of their professional design contract work. The services received from GoProto reflected Sentient Bionics’s sustainable mindset, through the use of HP MJF PA11 and PA12. Both PA11 and PA12 are highreusability materials that minimise waste, and PA11 is a renewable raw material produced from vegetable castor oil, resulting in a reduced environmental impact. Objective 3D, also an AM Hub member, was engaged for services including the manufacture of structural and functional parts of the prosthetic and robotic hands, which require alternative manufacturing methods not supplied by GoProto such as metal 3D printing and Polyjet 3D printing.
Sentient Bionics’s prosthetic hand product line
AMT OCT/NOV 2020
