Research on large-scale additive manufacturing based on multi-robot collaboration technology

Additive manufacturing is considered a promising technology for many applications, such as in the construction industry. However, the size of a design is constrained by the chamber volume of the 3D printer, and large-scale additive manufacturing technology with flexible equipment is still unproven. This paper proposes a large-scale 3D printing system composed of multiple robots working in collaboration. For this flexible and extensible 3D printing system, the influences of the multi-robot layout on the maximum reachable area and the geometry adaptability are discussed. Furthermore, a printer task optimized scheduling algorithm based on efficiency egalitarianism is proposed in this paper, and a robot interference avoidance strategy is designed by dividing the printing layer into several safe areas and interference areas. Collaborative printing experiments are implemented on the multi-robot platform, and the results show that the efficiency improvement with four robots exceeds 73 % compared with a general printing method.