A robotic system for rapid prototyping

Abstract

Reducing prototyping time is a good way to make the product development cycle shorter. This can be achieved in two ways: one is to develop new prototyping technologies like stereolithography apparatus (SLA), selective laser sintering (SLS) etc.; the other is to improve the principal existing technique which is CNC based method. In this paper, a robotic system for rapid prototyping which is an enhancement of the CNC based method is presented. A robot arm holding a milling tool is used to machine the prototype of a solid model drawn in commercial CAD systems. The rough cut and finish cut NC tool path for the robot arm are generated automatically from the solid model of an object. Objects may have different kinds of surfaces e.g. planar surface, general quadratic surface, B-spline surface and compound surface. The proposed method is implemented on the AutoCAD platform. A number of produced prototypes have shown satisfactory results.