A Novel Path Planning Approach for Non-planar Robotic Additive Manufacturing to Build and Repair the Parts of Cylindrical Geometry.

A conventional Additive Manufacturing (AM) system has 3-DOF, called 2.5D printing, since the print head moves in X and Y directions, and the print bed goes down (0.5Z) after printing one layer. Traditional AM machines always deposit the material in the direction of gravity. With the advent of multi-axis AM, it is possible to deposit the material in different directions. Multidirectional material deposition and non-planar AM are the prevailing AM techniques. A robotic manipulator has multiple DOFs that can deposit the material in different directions in a continuous 3D space. This paper presents a novel slicing and path planning method to print non-planar layers on a cylindrical surface and provide an information pathway for generating a trajectory starting from an STL CAD model. The process planning is implemented for cylindrical slicing and path planning using a boustrophedon algorithm for a binary map. The infill pattern is generated in planar space and transformed into cylindrical coordinates, and the orientation is generated using a heuristic path to affect the entire process. The cylindrical slicing algorithm is implemented for a 6-DOF robotic manipulator, and the proposed approach detects infill and non-infill regions on the cylinder with the help of binary maps. The proposed technique builds and repairs the parts of cylindrical geometry without any external rotation mechanism.