Realisation of robot ink deposition on a curved surface

Abstract

In the robot ink deposition system proposed in this paper, an Additive Manufacturing (AM) concept-based method generates an ink deposition path, and the developed adaptive compensation algorithm allows the robot to deposit ink on a curved surface based on B-spline surface theory. This method gives the robot arm more flexibility to print characters or to graph on a curved surface, and it affords the robot system a larger working envelope for ink deposition. A letter-printing experiment was conducted in a laboratory using this method. The results show that writing letters on the ink deposition path generated based on the AM concept is much easier than doing so on paths generated using existing methods, and that the adaptive compensation algorithm for printing letters on a large curved surface is effective.