A Review of Path Planning for Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM)

Abstract

The automatic generation of deposition paths for robotic Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) demands unique path planning methods than other additive manufacturing methods because of different natures of the welding processes. The tool paths for additive manufacturing by robotic welding are not fully identical to those of spray coating or CNC machining either. Recently, WAAM has been found to have great potential for the production of large metal parts, but it requires extensive research to make this new method commercially feasible and efficient. Moreover, the path planning methods should be capable of automatically generating optimal 2D paths for any given arbitrary geometry. The efficiency and accuracy of the whole WAAM process largely depend on successfully implementing the 2D tool paths. This paper reviews and analyzes the path planning techniques for WAAM. Various steps of path planning including domain decomposition, path generation, and path connection are elaborately described in this paper.