Development of Additive Manufacturing System by Parallel Mechanism with Six-Degrees-of-Freedom

(Conversion from STL Data of Additive Manufacturing to Control Data of Actuators)

Abstract

In this research, we developed a prototype of additive manufacturing (AM) system with a fixed material extrusion head and movable modeling stage by six-degrees-of-freedom parallel mechanism. The AM system enables layered modeling on a three-dimensional curved surface. In this paper, we investigated a method of conversion from STL data of additive manufacturing to control data of actuators for stacked modeling. We describe the data conversion method that generate new coordinates along the curved surface of the target object from STL data imported with MATLAB STL File Reader and calculate control data of each actuator.