The widespread deployment of service robots in domestic and professional environments demands structural solutions that simultaneously achieve high stiffness, low mass, and intrinsic safety. Traditional metallic structural designs face a fundamental physical conflict: achieving high stiffness typically results in excessive mass, which compromises operational safety and battery life. To solve this, this paper presents a critical review of an integrated lightweighting strategy combining material selection, structural design, and additive manufacturing for Carbon-Fiber-Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) service robot structures. Three critical findings are presented. First, specific stiffness is established as the governing criterion for material selection, providing a unified basis to resolve the stiffness–mass conflict. Second, among current 3D printing techniques, Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) with continuous-fiber reinforcement overcomes the geometric constraints of traditional molding, enabling the fabrication of complex, customized structures. Third, to realize the full potential of 3D-printed CFRP, we highlight the importance of integrating material properties (anisotropy), structural design (topology optimization), and manufacturing processes (path planning) into a concurrent framework. This integrated approach is validated through a collaborative robotic-arm case study, achieving a 30% reduction in structural mass.
Liu et al. (2026) studied this question.