Some inherent limitations exist in current Layered Manufacturing (LM) technologies (e.g. little choice of material, small part size and poor surface quality) and traditional NC machining (e.g. the confinement of tool accessibility to internal features). In order to overcome these limitations, a rapid manufacturing method called Robot based Layered Manufacturing (RoLM) in brief) is developed. A robot with a milling cutter mounted on the end- effector is used to build a part layer by layer. Given a part model, the determination of build orientation is the first step in the manufacturing cycle and has large effects on the surface quality and build time. In this paper, a set of criteria is proposed to rank the build orientations for RoLM by considering mainly part accuracy and build time. Algorithms are developed to calculate tool accessibility, part stability, and the number of required support for overhangs.

Date Published: 13 October 2000
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 4192, Intelligent Systems in Design and Manufacturing III, (13 October 2000); doi: 10.1117/12.403670

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4192:
Intelligent Systems in Design and Manufacturing III
Bhaskaran Gopalakrishnan; Angappa Gunasekaran, Editor(s)