3D Printing And Free-form Surface Coating Based on 6-DOF Robot

Abstract

At present, most of the 3D printing facilities are 3 degrees of freedom (DOF) that formed by planar stacking, which cannot achieve free-form surface spraying or other high DOF required operations. However, in a way, this problem can be solved by using a 6-axis manipulator, which is the future development trend of the 3D printing facilities. In this paper, a UR manipulator is used to realize the 3D printing function, especially the coating procedure of biomaterials, such as coating hydroxyapatite on the surface of artificial models. By dismantling the steps of our methodology, we firstly obtain the point cloud data of the 3D models and reconstruct the point cloud with a straightforward algorithm for the further subsequent path planning of UR manipulator for 3D printing. After that, the control parameter calculation of the printing path of UR is explained in detail. Finally, the printing accuracy of UR and interlayer uniformity of the 3D model are optimized by iterating the related experiments. The high-quality printed samples of the 3D models prove that our research has successfully achieved the practical application of UR manipulator in 3D printing.