Alternative CAM Solution for Adaptive Robotic Additive Manufacturing

The use of multi-purpose and gantry robots with 5 or more axes in large format additive manufacturing (LFAM) presents many opportunities and challenges. The ability to process large volumes of material and rapidly produce products of significant dimensions requires the formulation of an appropriate manufacturing strategy. This includes setting production parameters and selecting the right software to generate toolpath movements, considering the limitations of the technologies used in many applications as manufacturing of tooling and functional parts, composites or even for repairing of complex surface of parts. Slicing and printing strategies, especially in field of LFAM require specific approaches which lead researchers search for alternative solutions to conventional 3 axis planar principles by developing solution as non-planar, radial, cylindrical, spherical, load based tool path generation and other partial solution using different software techniques. Since no unified cost friendly solution has yet been developed that would allow the creation of such or similar results in a single software, this paper presents the principles on the basis of which such a solution could be created with the help of Rhinoceros GrasshopperTM (RG) software. In the individual chapters, current commercially available software slicers are presented, individual solutions of the researchers and possibilities of using RG with basic principles are shown whose functionality are verified by physical experimentation. Finally, the paper concludes with an evaluation of the experimental results and outlines the challenges but also the opportunities in the context of the use of RG in future applied research in the field of LFAM.