Transforming a Six Axis Robotic Arm into a Ceramic 3D Printer

Robotic arms are commonly used in factories to automate repetitive tasks, such as welding parts, painting equipment, or picking and placing items. Manufacturers design six-axis serial arm robots to specialize in carrying out predetermined tasks. However, the mobility of arm robots allows it to be modified by the user to carry out tasks it was not initially designed for. In this paper, we transform a six-axis arm robot into a ceramic 3D printer. A clay extruder powered by a stepper motor is connected to the robot using a custom attachment. The robot controller sends control signals from the arm robot's relay board to a custom printed circuit board (PCB) consisting of an ESP32 and a motor driver. The ESP32 allows us to take simple inputs from the robot and use them to control the extruder via the motor driver. Simple 3D objects were printed by directly inputting the G-code into the robot controller, and computer software such as Mastercam was used to generate the G-code for more complex designs. After numerous tests and fine-tuning, we can now consistently print sturdy and appealing objects.