Fabrication of glass with complex geometric structures by digital additive manufacturing (3D printing) presents a paradigm shift in glass design and molding processes. Till now, 3D printing glasses have suffered from limited printed glass materials and the low resolution of particle-based or fused glass technologies. Herein, a high-resolution 3D printing of transparent nanoporous glass is presented, by the combination of transparent photo-curable sol-gel printing compositions and vat photopolymerization technology (Digital Light Processing, DLP). Multi-component transparent glass, including binary, ternary, and quaternary oxide nanoporous glass objects with complex shapes, high spatial resolutions, and multi-oxide chemical compositions are fabricated, by DLP printing and subsequent sintering process. We successfully demonstrated the photoluminescence and hydrophobic modification of 3D printed glass objectives. This work extends the scope of 3D printing to transparent nanoporous glasses with complex geometry and facile functionalization, making them available for a wide range of applications.

Vertical farming has emerged as a sustainable, efficient, and climate-resilient food production method, which can improve food security. In most commercial vertical farms, harvesting is carried out manually, which are labor-intensive and costly. Numerous robotic grippers solutions have been developed for harvesting. However, they have limitations like restricted adaptivity, excessive mechanical stress on target, and poor accessibility, hindering their adoption for harvesting. Here, we present a tendon-driven gripper equipped with a capacitance-based contact sensor array. The proposed gripper can grow and twine around the target vegetable and adjust the tightness of its grip based on number of contacts. The proposed gripper can generate 4 to 10 N pulling force on bok choy and can also grip various gourds, leafy and podded vegetables. This work paves the way for harvesting automation in vertical farms. Apart from agriculture field, the smart gripper can also be used to grasp objects with various size, shape and weight in warehouse, and food & beverage industry.

Electroless or electrolytic deposition processes require the use of a very costly catalyst, usually palladium, as a seed material. Here we present the use of a copper complex as a very efficient replacement for the conventional catalysts, which can be directly printed by various technologies such as screen, gravure, and inkjet, on both 2D and 3D substrates. The copper complex can be reduced to pure copper upon short exposure to low-temperature plasma, by heating under inert atmosphere or via photonic sintering. By combining the complex with electroless plating (EP), a resistivity as low as 2.38.cm which corresponds to 72% conductivity of bulk copper can be achieved

This work demonstrates 3D printed soft actuators with complex shapes and remote actuation using an external magnetic field. Instead of embedding magnetic particles in a polymeric matrix, we fabricated a novel ferrofluid-based actuator, in which the fluid can be moved to different locations in the actuator to affect actuator response. We studied the effect of both the ferrofluid and the 3D printed material on the motion of simple actuators using 3D printed tubes. In addition, we 3D printed more complex actuators mimicking a human hand and a worm to demonstrate more complex motion.