Metals have been used for orthopedic implants for a long time due to their excellent mechanical properties. With the rapid development of additive manufacturing (AM) technology, studying customized implants with complex microstructures for patients has become a trend of various bone defect repair. A superior customized implant should have good biocompatibility and mechanical properties matching the defect bone. To meet the performance requirements of implants, this paper introduces the biomedical metallic materials currently applied to orthopedic implants from the design to manufacture, elaborates the structure design and surface modification of the orthopedic implant. By selecting the appropriate implant material and processing method, optimizing the implant structure and modifying the surface can ensure the performance requirements of the implant. Finally, this paper discusses the future development trend of the orthopedic implant.

Jumping is an important locomotion function to extend navigation range, overcome obstacles, and adapt to unstructured environments. In that sense, continuous jumping and direction adjustability can be essential properties for terrestrial robots with multimodal locomotion. However, only few soft jumping robots can achieve rapid continuous jumping and controlled turning locomotion for obstacle crossing. Here, we present an electrohydrostatically driven tethered legless soft jumping robot capable of rapid, continuous, and steered jumping based on a soft electrohydrostatic bending actuator. This 1.1 g and 6.5 cm tethered soft jumping robot is able to achieve a jumping height of 7.68 body heights and a continuous forward jumping speed of 6.01 body lengths per second. Combining two actuator units, it can achieve rapid turning with a speed of 138.4° per second. The robots are also demonstrated to be capable of skipping across a multitude of obstacles. This work provides a foundation for the application of electrohydrostatic actuation in soft robots for agile and fast multimodal locomotion.

In order improve the poor mechanical properties of the body-centred cubic (BCC) lattice structure, which suffers from the stress concentration effects at the nodes of the BCC unit cell, a graded-strut design method is proposed to increase the radii corner of the BCC nodes, which can obtain a new graded-strut body-centred cubic (GBCC) unit cell. After the relative density equation and the force model of the structure are obtained, the quasi-static uniaxial compression experiments and finite element analysis (FEA) of GBCC samples and BCC samples are performed. The experimental results show that for the fabricated samples with the same relative density, the GBCC can increase the initial stiffness by at least 38.20%, increase the plastic failure strength by at least 34.12%, compared with the BCC. Coupled experimental and numerical results not only suggest that the GBCC has better mechanical and impact resistance properties than the BCC, but also indicate that as the radii corner increases, the stress concentration effect at the node and the mechanical properties will be improved, which validates the proposed design method for graded-strut unit cells and can provide guidance for the design and future research on ultra-light lattice structures in related fields.