Building and Construction have recently become an exciting application ground for robotics. In particular, rapid progress in materials formulation and in robotics technology has made robotic 3D Printing of concrete a promising technique for in-situ construction. Yet, scalability remains an important hurdle to widespread adoption: the printing systems (gantry- based or arm-based) are often much larger than the structure to be printed, hence cumbersome. Recently, a mobile printing system - a manipulator mounted on a mobile base - was proposed to alleviate this issue: such a system, by moving its base, can potentially print a structure larger than itself. However, the proposed system could only print while being stationary, imposing thereby a limit on the size of structures that can be printed in a single take. Here, we develop a system that implements the printing-while-moving paradigm, which enables printing single-piece structures of arbitrary sizes with a single robot. This development requires solving motion planning, localization, and motion control problems that are specific to mobile 3D Printing. We report our framework to address those problems, and demonstrate, for the first time, a printing-while-moving experiment, wherein a 210 cm x 45 cm x 10 cm concrete structure is printed by a robot arm that has a reach of 87 cm.
Many groups work on automatizing construction process using 3D printing techniques and suggested different methods. One of the widely adopted methods is gantry-based concrete 3D printers @cite_11 @cite_19 @cite_10 . Due to the resemblance to the conventional additive manufacturing methods with printing nozzle moving in the Cartesian space, it is relatively easier to design the printer itself, and it is also straightforward to slice the printed shape and plan the motion of the nozzle. However, the printing area of these systems is limited to the space enclosed by the gantry. Thus, it is not possible to print any construction wider than the foothold distance of the gantry. Moreover, these system are in general extremely heavy and requires pre-installation on the printing site before each printing operation.
@cite_19 @cite_10 @cite_11
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ABSTRACTThree-dimensional (3D) printing (also known as additive manufacturing) is an advanced manufacturing process that can produce complex shape geometries automatically from a 3D computer-aided ... Contour Crafting is a mega scale layered fabrication process which builds large scale three-dimensional parts by depositing paste materials layer by layer at unprecedented speed and with superior surface quality. This paper presents an overview of related research activities and the progress aimed at extending the technology to construction of residential housing units and civil structures.