Development of a novel gantry system for cooperative printing of plastic materials

Abstract

It is well known that Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a slow process when compared to conventional manufacturing processes. To address this problem, this paper explores the concept of cooperative printing due to its ability to significantly increase the printing speed. It discusses current cooperative printing systems and proposes a new multi-arm configuration to address current limitations such as reduced cooperative printing area. The proposed configuration allows printing parts that are impossible to print or inefficiently printed by other configurations. Moreover, to improve efficiency and reduce printing time, new algorithms are proposed, including the Intermediate Point Method for collision avoidance. This method is three times more effective at preventing collisions compared to the current state-of-the-art algorithms and generates paths with lower travel durations. The proposed system was successfully tested in printing several single and multi-layer objects, showing a significant speed increase, surpassing the maximum printing time reduction reported in the literature.