Bioprinting Robot: Inkjet Cells to ABB Arms

A bioprinting robot lays down living cells, layer by layer, to build tissue. Most bioprinters so far have been boxes with a print head moving along three straight axes over a dish. Researchers are now mounting print heads on multi-axis robot arms that can print onto curved scaffolds, or straight into a wound on a patient. This post covers how bioprinting started with a modified office inkjet printer, how extrusion machines took over, what the October 2026 news from Russia and the United States shows, where ABB robots could fit, and what still stands between these machines and the clinic.

An Organovo bioprinter of the kind NCATS scientists used to print 3D human tissue models for drug screening, 2013. Photo: National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How an office inkjet printer started bioprinting

Bioprinting began on cheap office hardware. In 2003 Thomas Boland, then a bioengineering professor at Clemson University, filed a patent titled "Ink-jet printing of viable cells", with William Crisp Wilson Jr. and Tao Xu as co-inventors. A 2004 paper from his group in Biomaterials described a modified HP 550C desktop printer with an HP 51626a cartridge, printing cells onto "bio-paper" made of soy agar and collagen gel. Fewer than 8% of the cells burst on the way through the nozzle, so cells could clearly survive being printed.

The print head rail assembly from an HP Deskjet inkjet printer, the type of desktop hardware early cell printing used. Photo: MarcoTangerino / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Inkjet printing is fast but only places small drops, and many labs moved to extrusion, which pushes a thicker bioink (cells mixed into a gel) through a needle. Organovo, founded in San Diego in 2007, built on cell printing work by Gabor Forgacs's group at the University of Missouri and sold printed human tissue for drug testing, made on its NovoGen MMX bioprinter. In 2015 it agreed to supply 3D printed human skin to L'Oreal for testing cosmetics. Laser assisted printers give finer detail, but they cost more.

A researcher in a bioprinting lab printing 3D models of human tissue for drug screening, 2012. Photo: National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

At the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Anthony Atala's team also started on a modified desktop inkjet printer before building larger systems. In 2019 a group led by James Yoo and Atala published a mobile skin bioprinter in Scientific Reports. It took the patient's own skin cells, fibroblasts and keratinocytes, mixed them into a hydrogel and printed them straight into full thickness wounds on mice. Printing in place like this needs a print head that can follow the shape of a body, and that is where robot arms come in.

Research fellow Young Joon Seol prints experimental muscle tissue for reconstructive surgery, 2013. Photo: Army Medicine / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Robot arms that print onto curves and wounds today

On 1 October 2026 Rostec said it would show a skin printing robot at the Bioprom-2026 forum in Gelendzhik on 5 and 6 October. The system, developed by NUST MISIS and 3D Bioprinting Solutions on a Russian DOKA RC5 collaborative robot, scans a wound, builds a 3D model and lays down a cell laden hydrogel as a mesh with 0.6 mm cells, adjusting as the patient breathes. On 5 October Rostec reported that after tests on 36 animals the robot had carried out its first successful operation on a human patient. Toxicological and clinical trials are still needed before it can be registered.

A 3D bioprinter built by the Russian company 3D Bioprinting Solutions, 2014. Photo: Andrey Ilyin / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Universities have built similar machines. In 2022 a Tsinghua University group led by Tao Xu described an adaptive multi-axis bioprinting robot with 3D scanning and closed loop vision that printed stem cells into wounds on mice and regrew skin with hair follicles. A University of Manchester team turned a six-axis Universal Robots UR3 arm into a bioprinter that prints cells onto curved vascular scaffolds from all directions to make cardiac tissue. And on 2 October 2026 EurekAlert! reported a Terasaki Institute award of up to $19.8 million from ARPA-H's PRINT program for a liver bioprinting project.

Techshot's BioFabrication Facility, a 3D bioprinter installed aboard the International Space Station. Photo: NASA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

We found no published bioprinting work on an ABB arm, so what follows is a possibility. ABB's GoFa CRB 15000 and single-arm YuMi IRB 14050 already work next to people in labs, and our post on robot-run research labs shows GoFa cells handling samples. ABB robots such as the IRB 6700 extrude concrete in 3D printing cells, with print paths turned into robot programs in RobotStudio. A cobot holding a bioink nozzle and guided by a scanner would be doing something close to what ABB arms do in food 3D printing.

An engineer runs a robot 3D print planned in ABB RobotStudio. Photo: ABB

What comes next for bioprinting robots

In labs the next step is scale. Printed tissue for drug testing needs many identical samples, and robot cells could load cartridges, swap print heads and move plates into incubators while keeping the work sterile. Arms with six or more axes can print on curved scaffolds and then pass them on to the next station. That fits the work ARPA-H funds through PRINT, which aims at organs that would not need immunosuppressive drugs, though whole printed organs with working blood vessels are still a long way off.

An ABB GoFa cobot working with lab instruments at the SLAS lab automation conference. Photo: ABB

For patients, the near term target is skin. The Rostec developers list burns, trophic ulcers and large soft tissue injuries, and the Wake Forest and Tsinghua studies point the same way. A robot that scans a wound, plans a path and prints the patient's own cells at the bedside could shorten the time a burn stays open. None of these systems is an approved product yet, and the human use reported so far comes from the developers, with no published trial behind it.

A laminar flow cabinet set up for tissue culture, where printed cells are handled. Photo: Miles Smith / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Cells die if they are sheared too hard in a nozzle or wait too long outside an incubator, so print speed and bioink recipes have to be worked out together. A robot working on a patient needs medical device approval, sterile covers and force limits that a standard lab cobot does not come with. Costs are high, and bioprinting teams need people who understand cell biology and robot motion at the same time. Regulators also have to decide how to judge a treatment that is part machine and part living tissue.

An ABB YuMi holds a pipette next to a lab technician, from ABB's material on robots for labs and hospitals. Photo: ABB

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