Conformal additive manufacturing using dual arm manipulator

Abstract

Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) in the Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a widely popular method in which thermoplastic resin is melted and extruded through a nozzle. However, it has issues such as anisotropy and the inability to produce smooth curved surfaces. Robotic AM, which uses a vertically articulated robot with more redundant degrees of freedom than conventional AM systems, has been investigated to fabricate curved surfaces while changing the orientation of the layers. One of the effective uses is conformal AM, in which curved layers are arranged along the original geometry. In addition, a method using two vertically articulated robots has been proposed for Robotic AM to avoid singularities. In this study, we propose FFF method for arbitrarily shaped curved surface deposition with avoiding singularities by simultaneously controlling the nozzle-side arm and bed-side arm of a dual arm robot. A system with redundant degrees of freedom was developed using ROS2, and the effectiveness of the method for winding continuous fibers without cutting them was confirmed.