A Nozzle Path Planner for 3-D Printing Applications

Additive manufacturing technologies have been widely applied in both household and industrial applications. The fabrication time of a three-dimensional (3-D) printed object can be shortened by optimizing its segments printing order. The computational times required by existing nozzle path planning algorithms can increase rapidly with the number of printing segments. In this article, the nozzle path planning problem is formulated as an undirected rural postman problem and a computationally efficient heuristic search algorithm is proposed to find fast routes and mitigate overheads in printing processes. Both simulation and experimental results concur that the proposed algorithm can significantly speed up printing processes and outperform its counterparts in 3-D printing applications.