PATH PLANNING FOR ROBOT-ASSISTED RAPID PROTOTYPING OF ICE STRUCTURES

Abstract

The development of a path-planning algorithm for the robot-assisted rapid prototyping (RP) of ice structures is reported here. The algorithm, written in Matlab code, first imports a stereolithography (STL) file, which contains the geometry of the part to be built, and a text file containing other configuration parameters. The algorithm then finds intersection contours between evenly-spaced horizontal planes and the part; these contours define the boundaries of the areas to be filled for each layer. Each contour is then grouped with the other contours that define the same area. Subsequently, support structure contours are generated automatically from the part model; a support structure CAD model is not required. Then, part and support areas are filled by iteratively shrinking each outer contour until inner boundaries are reached.