Acta Mechanica Slovaca 2024, 28(2):76-82 | DOI: 10.21496/ams.2024.022

Angled G-Code Generator for Robotics Additive Manufacturing

Pavol Štefčák¹, Ivan Gajdoš¹, Ján Slota¹, Lukasz Sobaszek²

¹ Technical University of Košice, Faculty of Mechanical engineering, Department of Technology, Materials and Computer Supported Production, Mäsiarska 74, 040 01 Košice, Slovakia

² Lublin University of Technology, Faculty of Mathematics and Information Technology, Department of Computational Intelligence, Nadbystrzycka 38, 20-618 Lublin, Poland

The current state of the utilization of robotic arms in large-scale additive manufacturing (AM) has spurred the development of new hardware and software solutions stemming from the need to reduce the cost of preprocessing and production itself. The use of 6 degrees of freedom combined with the proper software solution for generating the machine motion paths can largely save the time and material required for production of the large-format products. Although several studies have been carried out in this area outlining the possibilities of generating non-planar layers exploiting the potential of 4 or more degrees of freedom all these studies have been carried out by users with programming and complex mathematics skills, which may be a challenge for some users. Therefore, in this paper, the use of Rhinoceros® Grasshopper™ software as a mean for generating non-planar layers is discussed, to offer an alternative option for users without these skills. To demonstrate this, a simple grasshopper system was created to generate angular layers. The challenges and user possibilities were outlined, and experimental verification was carried out on an industrial robotic arm FANUC M-20iB/25 equipped with an MDPH2 pellet extruder. Cube shape part with dimensions 100x100x100 mm was produced and analysed. The proposed method has considerable potential as an option for a non-planar robotics tool path generation, however further research has to be done concerning error free G-code generation and subsequent checking.

Keywords: Rhinoceros, Grasshopper; additive manufacturing; Robotics 3D printing; Large format additive manufacturing

Received: June 6, 2024; Revised: August 28, 2024; Accepted: September 3, 2024; Published: June 14, 2024  Show citation