Abstract
Robotic additive manufacturing (AM) has gained much attention for its continuous material deposition capability with continuously changeable building orientations, reducing support structure volume and post-processing complexity. However, the current robotic additive process heavily relies on manual geometric reasoning that identifies additive features, related building orientations, tool approach direction, trajectory generation, and sequencing all features in a non-collision manner. In addition, multi-directional material accumulation cannot ensure the nozzle always stays above the building geometry. Thus, the collision between these two becomes a significant issue that needs to be solved. Hence, the common use of a robotic additive is hindered by the lack of fully autonomous tools based on the abovementioned issues. We present a systematic approach to the robotic AM process that can automate the abovementioned planning procedures in the aspect of collision-free. Typically, input models to robotic AM have diverse information contents and data formats, hindering the feature recognition, extraction, and relations to the robotic motion. Our proposed method integrates the collision-avoidance condition to the model decomposition step. Therefore, the decomposed volumes can be associated with additional constraints, such as accessibility, connectivity, and trajectory planning. This generates an entire workspace for the robotic additive building platform, rotatability, and additive features to determine the entire sequence and avoid potential collisions. This approach classifies the uniqueness of autonomous manufacturing on the robotic AM system to build large and complex metal components that are non-achievable through traditional one-directional AM in a computationally effective manner. This approach also paves the path in constructing an in situ monitoring and closed-loop control on robotic AM to control and enhance the build quality of the robotic metal AM process.
Highlights
Robotic additive manufacturing (AM)'s continuous rotatability of the building geometry enlarges the design space and complexity compared with traditional metal AM or subtractive processes
The conventional AM process is constrained in the single material accumulation direction that creates support structures underneath the overhang surfaces, for the metal
The local and global collision needs to be avoided in developing the autonomous robotic AM process
Summary
Robotic AM's continuous rotatability of the building geometry enlarges the design space and complexity compared with traditional metal AM or subtractive processes. Robotic AM achieves the continuous change of building orientation during the material deposition process, transforming overhang surfaces into a support-free manner under a different orientation. The main contribution proposed in this field is to provide a computerized non-collision process planning method of any given CAD model on a robotic AM system without human interpretation. It has significant benefits in saving manual work time and providing a process solution on a robotic additive manufacturing system. Two-dimensional planar and three-dimensional freeform slicing methods will be applied to the sequenced AM features for generating the overall trajectory on the geometry
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