Robotic Free-Oriented Additive Manufacturing Technique for Thermoplastic Lattice and Cellular Structures

Abstract

This paper presents a novel Additive Manufacturing application of situated Robotic Fused Deposition Modeling (RFDM) for thermoplastic cellular and lattice structures, called Free-Oriented Additive Manufacturing (FOAM), to accommodate variations in spatial conditions, deposition direction, and geometry in order to adapt to complex infrastructure settings, thus, breaking the conventional layer-by-layer stacking principle and the constant constraint of locking the tip of the nozzle to the negative Z direction when fabricating at an architectural scale.