President Donald Trump has declared the imports of foreign-made factory robots to be a national security threat—ordering new US negotiations with trading partners while holding out the possibility of imposing new tariffs on such robot imports in the future.
Issued on October 28, Trump’s presidential proclamation represents heightened government scrutiny of foreign-made industrial robots that could complicate the manufacturing operations of major US corporations that rely on such robots. Those companies include Detroit automakers General Motors and Ford, electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, and aerospace and defense giants like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Trump’s proclamation describes industrial robots and machinery as being crucial for producing US military weapon systems along with representing a “driving force” behind all critical infrastructure sectors within the US economy. The proclamation cites an investigation under US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick as having found that US imports of such robots “pose[] risks to the United States industrial base and threatens the long-term competitiveness of the United States in a sector that is increasingly vital to national security.”
US chip champion Intel was so confused by the US government ban on foreign-made robots that it requested and received a waiver “out of an abundance of caution.” The tech company wanted to make sure that it could continue using certain robotic vehicles in its US chip fabs.
The uncertainty surrounding the Federal Communications Commission ban on certain foreign-made robots was revealed in the agency’s decision to grant Intel’s waiver request. On October 22, the FCC published its order allowing Intel to continue using the foreign-made robots in US semiconductor manufacturing facilities for a period of one year.
The robots in question are automated guided vehicles operating on “tracks or predefined paths” while often requiring operator oversight, according to Intel’s website. They help to move materials and items around within warehouses and factory floors.
Recently [Riley] got his paws on an old Prusa i3 FDM printer that had clearly seen better days, with a hot-end that had suffered an explosive blow-out. For the project he had in mind this was of course perfect, as his intention was to replace the hot-end with a syringe system for embedded 3D printing (E3DP), which uses a supportive medium to allow for the printing of materials and structures that would be impossible with just air.
Generally in additive manufacturing (AM) methods like fused deposition modelling (FDM) the material is extruded onto a build plate or a previous layer where it solidifies. This works great for materials like thermoplastics, but for other materials having only the surrounding air as support is just a recipe for a big mess. With E3DP the liquid is instead extruded into a supportive material at a selectable depth and volume, opening up a whole range of possibilities.
In a 2026 review article by [Rongji Tang] et al. in Frontiers in Materials provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in E3DP, including many ongoing research questions pertaining to print quality, the types of supportive material and their potential reuse, as well as extrusion control. Applications for E3DP are many, with it seeing use in flexible- and soft robotics, printing biological tissues and microfluidics.
While some types of fluids are easier to print than others, Newtonian fluids like silicone oil pose issues with reliable printing, as detailed by [Hejoon Jun] et al. in a 2025 paper in Applied Materials & Interfaces, while a 2026 paper by [Min Ye] et al. in International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing covers the challenges of printing living tissues this way, with a self-healing supporting medium described, creating a method called EPICS.
The silicone-in-hair-gel print in progress.
In the video by [Riley] the fundamentals are explained in a comprehensive manner, before building an E3DP setup, with an open source Allstruder syringe pump and a Caribou Duet 3 motherboard replacing the Prusa parts. Following this a test print is made using cream cheese as it’s apparently an ideal test material.
After a successful cream cheese test, a print is started involving two-part epoxy, with the supporting material being hair gel. The epoxy, once mixed, has only a time window of about forty minutes before it hardens, so that’s all the time you have to empty the syringe. As it turns out, hair gel and epoxy aren’t friends, so for a final print the printing material was switched to silicone, specifically Sylgard 184.
Although not a perfect result, it’s pretty cool to see the silicone trifold torus take shape in what appears to be a void. Unfortunately the hair gel doesn’t appear to be a perfect material either, as some of the additives in it apparently inhibit the silicone from curing. As reported by [Riley] in a comment to the video, the silicone print was still goopy after a few days.
We hope that it’ll cure before long, and wish him luck in finding a supporting material that’s more supportive of printing materials like silicone actually curing.
Login
