The new exhibition Blind machines, a large 3D printing machine

摘要

This paper presents the further developments and preliminary results of a large 3D printing machine based on a 3 d.o.f cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) that is used for an artistic exhibition. The printing material is a powder constituted of glass micro-beads that is deposited on a fixed trajectory so that the resulting structure collapses with time. A first exhibition has been held during the summer of 2019 and another one was scheduled to take place during ICRA 2020, that was canceled because of the Covid. The current exhibition has started on 07/09/2022 and will end on 10/14/2019. We describe in this paper the improvements of the current prototype, both on hardware and software, compared to the 2019 and 2020 versions. Between 7/9/2022 and 16/10/2022 the CDPR has run for 126 hours and has traveled on a total distance of 9km. During the period 142 layers have been deposited, representing a mass of 2.56 tons of glass powder.