42nd Annual Conference of the IEEE-Industrial-Electronics-Society (IECON), Florence, Italy, 24 - 27 October 2016, pp.4582-4587
This study develops a novel command generation paradigm for desktop fused filament fabrication 3D printers. In the conventional approach, designed artifact in CAD software is saved as an STL file, which is still a de-facto file standard in the field, and then imported into the CAM software of the corresponding 3D printer. After adjusting the printing parameters (feed rate, layer thickness, infill percentage, etc.), the G-code file is generated within the CAM software and it is transferred to the printer for the fabrication. There are various problems of this conventional design and manufacturing pipeline of 3D printers. The proposed command generation paradigm overcomes most of these drawbacks of the conventional scheme by taking advantage of the high redundancy of the motion trajectories of the printer heads. These paths are modeled with the available functions of the scheme and processed on the printer side. The main advantage is that the generated command trajectory file can easily be modified as opposed to the G-code files and be used for the fabrication of different artifacts.