Javier Ramos: The boy who played with robots and revolutionized 3D printing

At the age of 26, he co-founded Inkbit, a pioneering company creating machines with “eyes” and “brains” capable of printing objects with flexible materials; With 32 he created replicas of hands. Javier Ramos, a Puerto Rican whose father is from Madrid, went from playing with robots at his high school in San Juan to revolutionizing 3D printing

“I was one of those kids who loved to play with Legos and build things,” explained the Puerto Rican in an interview with EFE, who discovered that he was passionate about robotics in his institute’s robotics club, and later, so was he. He was fascinated by the 3D printing machines he was able to “play with” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he studied mechanical engineering.

Much of the commercial technology for printing things since the 1990s has been developed at this prestigious university in Boston, where the distinguished minds with access to it, like Ramos, can try it out on campus and learn how to improve it.

Under the guidance of one of MIT’s leaders in the field, Professor Wojciech Matousek, Ramos directed his final-year project to “getting inkjet printers to image polymers instead of ink and provide that technology with the power of vision” and real-time computing and scanning.

Printers with brains

In his early twenties, Ramos created the first 3D machine that prints polymers and is equipped with “eyes” and a “brain”: the “eyes” monitor what is printed, and the machine’s “brain” directs what should be printed. .

When asked why it was the first thing he was able to print with his invention, the scientist said that he spent a lot of time “printing small things with a lot of perseverance, pieces that combined rigid and flexible materials, with different colors and geometric shapes, and from there it was the first use.” “We were able to make the lenses.”

To commercialize this new technology called MultiFab, Inkbit was born in 2017, one of the most fruitful entrepreneurial companies to have produced the corridors of MIT in recent years.

Revolutionary applications

Among the huge amount of things that can now be 3D printed (from knee or hip prosthetics to food), Ramos, who was director of science and technology at Inkbit, developed increasingly complete parts for robots with the goal that “they don’t require assembly and manufacturing becomes increasingly simpler and more efficient.”

A large part of their customers, who buy their machines (which cost about half a million euros) or ask them to print parts, need robots to make packaging operations more efficient, and in many cases to prepare shipments for online shopping.

Because their machines can print with very flexible materials and all kinds of geometric shapes, Ramos has also created a number of models that are used in medical research, such as the aneurysms he shows during this video interview, dental splints, or other custom bone pieces.

The latest, published in Nature, is the creation of a fully 3D-printed robotic gripper shaped like a human hand and controlled by 19 independently moving tendons, soft fingers with sensor pads and rigid load-bearing bones.

They also created a six-duck walking robot capable of detecting and grasping objects, thanks to the system’s ability to create airtight interfaces of soft and hard materials and complex channels within the structure, or a heart-like pump with integrated, artificial ventricles. Heart valves.

Next shift

Ramos believes 3D printing will transform the manufacturing sector and related jobs, but it “will not replace” all manufacturing industries or jobs.

“They will produce new methods and other types of products that cannot be achieved using traditional techniques, saving time and improving materials,” he said.

“The 3D system improves the carbon footprint because you can print parts where you need them, without having to travel and without wasting materials,” he added.

He stressed that this is “just the beginning.” “There are many new types of material families that can be added to this technology, such as hydrogels or silicones.”

3D printing still has major scientific and technological advances to come, and Ramos is credited with continuing to be the “brains” behind many of these advances.