Identification of Uncertainty Cases in Robots with Focus on Additive Manufacturing Technology: A Mini Review

Abstract

Despite more than three decades since the beginning of Additive Manufacturing (AM), many challenges and issues prevent the industrialization of this technology. In fact, productivity is related to repetitive production of the same part under the same fabrication conditions. Currently, it is difficult to guarantee this repetitive production due to uncertainty issues, which represents the main obstacle of AM industrialization. In this paper, the uncertainty issues can be divided into two levels. The first level is related to the used AM machine itself which can be considered as robot of 3 degrees of freedom (x, y and z). In addition to its movement in three directions, this robot (AM machine) extrudes melted materials. The second level is related to the associated robots with 3D printing machines. In addition to summarizing some previous works and reviews, this mini review has the objective to provide new ideas to develop new strategies to overcome some uncertainty issues to contribute to the industrialization of AM technology. Furthermore, it paves the way to establish a concurrent AM / robotics loop in order to use AM for robotics and robotics for AM. The different developments should lead to elaborating Industrialization Standard for AM (IS4AM) where the different findings and recomm