3D printers are an excellent tool to have on hand, largely because they can print other tools and parts rapidly without needing to have them machined or custom-ordered. 3D printers have dropped in price as well, so it’s possible to have a fairly capable machine in your own home for only a few hundred dollars. With that being said, there are some limitations to their function but some of them can be mitigated by placing the printer head on a robot arm rather than on a traditional fixed frame.
The experimental 3D printer at the University of Nottingham adds a six-axis robotic arm to their printer head, which allows for a few interesting enhancements. Since the printer head can print in any direction, it allows material to be laid down in ways which enhance the strength of the material by ensuring the printed surface is always correctly positioned with respect to new material from the printer head. Compared to traditional 3D printers which can only print on a single plane, this method also allows for carbon fiber-reinforced prints since the printer head can follow non-planar paths.
Of course, the control of this printer is much more complicated than a traditional three-axis printer, but it is still within the realm of possibility with readily-available robotics and microcontrollers. And this is a hot topic right now: we’ve seen five-axis 3D printers, four-axis 3D printers, and even some clever slicer hacks that do much the same thing. Things are finally heating up in non-planar 3D printing!
Thanks to [Feinfinger] for the tip!
Logical extension I guess, time will come I think we’ll have an upper torso human like robot with greater articulation of limbs then the limited human skeletal arm movements. What would be interesting is having the scaled up or down Eg in telepresence mode as micro manipulators eg for watches and working on other even tinier mechanical fabrications & scaled up for all sorts of high end heavy industry uses. Video bookmarked :-)
Thanks for posting.
Suggest you Google “Baxter robot”
I worked with Baxter robot for a couple of years on and off.
Nice bit of kit, but way too compliant. it just bounced off things.
On the plus side, i made it hug people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ63okIuWfE
I sketched up this exact idea back in 2015 after setting up my first 3D printer, a Chinese delta machine that cost $500 on eBay.
This really illustrates the importance of sharing your ideas, rather than letting them rot, unimplemented, in a notebook somewhere.
I’m still slowly working on a 6 axis slicer, and a 5 axis printer, at https://github.com/julialongtin/hslice/
This has already been achieved by a few companies for industrial 3D printing purposes, most notable in my mind by Electroimpact in Washington State, USA.
https://www.electroimpact.com/3d/overview.aspx