• Bioprinting
• Robotic Arm
• Tissue Engineering

Tissue Engineering (TE) aims at repairing a damaged tissues or enhancing a specific tissue function.
The main paradigm of TE consists into building a scaffold, a supporting structure where seeding the cells that will be implanted into the human body. The scaffold has to mimick the topology of the extracellular matrix (ECM) that guides cells proliferation and differentiation. In the last years, the development of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies was exploited in TE as the main strategy to pattern and assembly living and non living materials with a prescribed 2 or 3-dimensional organization. For this reason, the term Bioprinting was coined. The hierarchical and heterogeneous structure of the ECM also brought the necessity of developing new fabrication systems to combine different AM technologies in order to obtain multi material and multi scale constructs. This thesis was carried on in the framework of the international project IMAGO (Italian-MexicAn working Group on biOfabrication), which is focused on the development of a new bioprinting platform for 3-dimensional skeletal and cardiac muscular tissue fabrication. The chosen platform to satisfly these specifications was a robotic arm because of the possibilities of having a larger workspace guaranteed by the availability of more degrees of freedom. This allows the printing tool change to combine different AM technologies in the same printing process. Moreover, it also opens the perspective of in situ bioprinting, which consists into directly printing onto the irregular surfaces of the human body.

The work is organized in the following chapters:
in Chapter 1 Tissue Engineering and the most important AM technologies are presented;
Chapter 2 presents a literature analysis of the state of art of bioprinting applied to skeletal and cardiac muscle regeneration;
in Chapter 3 the chosen robotic arm is presented with a deep description of its hardware;
Chapter 4 is about the control of the arm using Matlab software and Arduino Due board;
Chapter 5 shows the printing tests with the robotic arm;
Chapter 6 presents the new trend of in situ bioprinting with also the proof of concept by using the Panda robotic arm to dispense material onto different silicone substrates;
Chapter 7 is about the conclusions.