Are you tired of your printer being tied to the three dimensional cartesian planes? Break your industrial robot free from planar slicing. Emil Johansson and his team at Adaxis are developing a slicer for just this.
Working together with Emil, this ABB 6700 industrial robot, and Adaxis beta software AdaOne, we are able to slice a print along a chosen spline curve.
Industrial robots are nothing new. They have been tirelessly chugging along in factories around the globe for decades, performing repetitive tasks at often superhuman speeds and precision. They do very well carrying out this repetition without the need for breaks or yearly increases in salary. We can adapt these robots with polymer extruders or welding heads and turn them into very capable 3d printers.
As you can see in the video, Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is the process of automatically depositing and fusing together a polymer over time, layer by layer, with the goal of producing a three dimensional part or product. In this case a 200 mm diameter pipe with a complex curvature.
Normally, tool paths creation is carried out parallel to the printing surface. A layer thickness is chosen and parallel slices are computed from the 3d model. Machine code in the form of coordinates and extrusion rate is created from these slices.
The AdaOne software allows us to break out of this XY plane. This is a real benefit in the world of robot arm printing.
Why should we do this?
The FDM layer-based approach of manufacturing has benefits but for most materials there is one major drawback, its inherent anisotropy. A part printed layer by layer is often much stronger along its layers than between them. There are many factors at play which can lead to stronger or weaker bonds and is mostly linked to the temperature difference between the previous extruded layer and the new layer. The finer details of these factors are beyond the scope here, and if you would like to know more, Stefan of CNC kitchen does a great job of illustrating this in his videos.