This study addresses build quality issues in robotic Additive Manufacturing (AM) for fabrics by using vertical articulated robots to realize the digital manufacturing system that handles consistent processes from design to fabrication via computer. Conventional robotic AM faces problems on velocity fluctuations caused by changes in robot posture during conformal AM where the tool moves following curved surface, which leads to uneven widths of extruded material deposition. Especially, in FFF-AM with continuous fiber composites, fiber accumulation occurs by unstable extrusion speed, which results in critical defects. Therefore, this study proposes and develops a system that synchronously controls material extrusion speed according to the velocity of robot's end-effector. In the proposed method, the robot's motion speed is simulated using ROS2 and the material extrusion volume control is operated using micro-ROS. Experiments using continuous fiber composites and a hat-shaped case study showed that the proposed method achieves stable fabrication even in 3D free-form objects on curved surfaces. Finally, the proposed system demonstrated significant contribution to realizing the digital manufacturing system for fabrics.
ITO et al. (Thu,) studied this question.