ABSTRACTThis paper proposes integration of reconfigurable manufacturing (RM) with layered manufacturing (LM) for development of reconfigurable multi-material layered manufacturing (MMLM) systems for fabrication of large, complex objects. We present a virtual prototyping system with reconfigurable actuators (VPRA) that can increase the number of materials, speed, and build volume to improve the efficiency and flexibility of MMLM. The VPRA system offers a test bed for design, visualization, and validation of MMLM facilities and processes. It takes advantage of the convenient graphics platform of SolidWorksTM for constructing a virtual MMLM facility by selecting reconfigurable actuators from predefined templates. The characteristics, including the dimensions and relative spatial constraints, of the actuators can be conveniently configured to suit design requirements. Besides, a practical approach for toolpath planning of vector-based MMLM processes with multiple robotic actuators is proposed. It classifies a...