Flexible Hybrid Digital Toolchain for Robotic Additive Manufacturing using Industry 4.0, and Industrial Robot and PLC systems

A flexible hybrid digital toolchain is developed, aimed to facilitate the integration of reliable industrial robots and programmable logic controllers (PLCs) into adaptable additive manufacturing (AM) solutions. This approach involves the fusion of Industry 4.0 principles with the capabilities of the Robot Operating System (ROS) in conjunction with a PLC and robot manipulator for wire and arc metal 3D printing. The integration utilizes the ROS additive manufacturing toolchain for trajectory planning, seamlessly linking with a PLC via EtherNet/IP (EIP) protocol using the Pylogix Python library, and the PLC also establishes communication with the robot controller (RC) through EIP. For the simulation and testing of trajectories, a commercial simulation software is used. This work results in an end-to-end PLC-based industrially compliant robotic solution for additive manufacturing capable of utilizing ROS capabilities including kinematics, motion planning, simulation, and visualization, and PLC demonstrated reliability. The simulation and testing in software serve to demonstrate the functionality of the system and the overall outcome is to leverage existing industrial manipulators and PLCs as dynamic AM solution through the convergence of Industry 4.0 concepts and ROS capabilities.