Projector-Guided Non-Holonomic Mobile 3D Printing

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-cost, projector-guided non-holonomic mobile 3D printing system that enables large-scale additive manufacturing with high accuracy, minimal calibration, and collaborative multi-robot printing capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a learning-based visual servoing approach using a regular projector for precise trajectory following without external localization devices.

Findings

Achieves millimeter-level trajectory accuracy

Enables large-scale 3D printing exceeding desktop printer size

Demonstrates collaborative multi-robot printing

Abstract

Fused deposition modeling (FDM) using mobile robots instead of the gantry-based 3D printer enables additive manufacturing at a larger scale with higher speed. This introduces challenges including accurate localization, control of the printhead, and design of a stable mobile manipulator with low vibrations and proper degrees of freedom. We proposed and developed a low-cost non-holonomic mobile 3D printing system guided by a projector via learning-based visual servo-ing. It requires almost no manual calibration of the system parameters. Using a regular top-down projector without any expensive external localization device for pose feedback, this system enabled mobile robots to accurately follow pre-designed millimeter-level printing trajectories with speed control. We evaluate the system in terms of its trajectory accuracy and printing quality compared with original 3D designs. We further demonstrated the potential of this system using two such mobile robots to collaboratively print a 3D object with dimensions of 80cm x 30cm size, which exceeds the limitation of common desktop FDM 3D printers.