Extrusion control strategy for robotic-based in situ bioprinting

Robotic-based in situ bioprinting is a very promising technology to overcome the limitations of the traditional scaffold-based tissue engineering approach. One of the most used bioprinting technologies to deposit the biomaterial directly onto/into a damaged site of the patient is based on a pneumatic extrusion. During the printing phase, the robotic manipulator end-effector is subjected to continuous changes in speed and direction to follow complex anatomical surfaces. For this reason, in this work we describe the development of an extrusion control strategy to obtain a uniform biomaterial deposition during a robotic-based in situ bioprinting procedure. The proposed algorithm was tested onto IMAGObot, a 5-axes robotic platform optimized for in situ bioprinting applications.