Much of 3D printing up until now focused on the idea of prototyping, or printing out things to test but not necessarily meant for the mass market. Formlabs is attempting to change that, showing off it’s recently released 3D printer, dubbed the Fuse 1, at CES 2018.
Chief Product Officer Dávid Lakatos stopped by the DT CES booth Tuesday afternoon to talk about the company’s efforts. After sorting out a bit of mic trouble on our part (sorry, folks!) Lakatos wowed us with what is the future of 3D printing, and what we crowned as the top emerging tech product of the year in 2017.
He pointed out that much of the current printers out there — including the one that printed the DT logo sitting on our desk this week — use a process that’s akin to a glue gun adding plastic layer by layer to form 3D shapes. The result isn’t the prettiest, and even the best printers still produce prints that are fairly rough without some post-print touch-ups.
The Fuse 1 uses a process known as “selective layer sintering.” Instead of the spools of plastic that we’re used to, Formlabs’ Fuse 1 uses a powder which is heated to right below the point where it would melt. From there a laser is selectively aimed at the particles, fusing them together.
As a result, not only are the prints much smoother — in fact some of the smoothest we’ve ever seen — they’re also incredibly strong. Dávid noted that this method creates highly durable parts, but due to its expensive nature, only about 2-3,000 of these types of 3D printers have been made. The Fuse 1 is an effort to double that number within a year.
At a price point of $10,000, the Fuse 1 definitely isn’t cheap, but compared to industrial SLS machines, it’s outrageously affordable. What’s more exiting though, is the fact that it can be used not only to produce prototype objects, but also “mass customized” products that can be sold and used directly after being printed.
Lakatos showed examples of custom earbuds that could be made to fit customer’s ear shapes perfectly in less than two hours, custom fit sunglasses, and a bevy of medical grade objects including prosthetics, casts, and even temporary dentures. Even the most complex prints wouldn’t take more than 8-10 hours, he says.
Formlabs is also working with New Balance to create custom insoles, which are important to prevent and relieve foot and back pain. That partnership was announced last year.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.