Hardware

3D Printing (Additive Manufacturing)

3D printing (additive manufacturing) is the fabrication of parts by depositing or fusing material layer by layer from a digital model, spanning processes from fused deposition modeling (FDM) in thermoplastics to selective laser sintering and metal powder-bed fusion. Robotics labs and companies rely on it for rapid iteration of grippers, fingertips, sensor mounts, and linkages, and research printers produce compliant mechanisms and soft robots directly.

Why it matters for physical AI

Same-day iteration on end effectors and fixtures collapses the hardware-software co-design loop, letting teams adapt grippers to the failure modes their learned policies actually exhibit rather than designing around them in software.