Detect-Remove-Replace: A Robotic Solution That Enables Unmanned Continuous 3D Printing

Fused filament fabrication (FFF) 3D printing is one of the most common additive processes due to its low cost and speed of production. There has been growing interest to have a fleet of such printers, which can be procured at low cost, as they have enormous potential of providing a large volume of continuous production of customized parts on demand. However, the main bottleneck for the FFF printing process is that the part must be manually removed before the next print can commence as the print bed is occupied. Time is also wasted when erroneous print is not stopped. This requirement increases the downtime of the machines significantly, which affects utilization and profit. The process is desired by several industries for continuous printing around the clock. Therefore, this article presents a system with vision-based failure detection and robotic manipulation, termed
detect-remove-replace
(
DRR
), to address the aforementioned issues. It provides automated monitoring and part extraction for FFF 3D printers while eliminating the need for manual intervention to enable unmanned continuous printing. The experimental results show that DRR is able to detect common defects of the prints (such as spaghetti, detachment, and air printing) with 85.11% accuracy. In addition, the prints are successfully removed 20 times out of 21 tests, and the heatbed steel sheet is robustly replaced for the next prints with a 100% success rate.