A Novel Pivot-Move Strategy for Dual-Robot Manipulator Additive Manufacturing (2025-11)¶

Robot-assisted additive manufacturing (AM) has been gaining increasing popularity due to its great flexibility and reachability. Moreover, an AM system with dual deposition-heads held by robot manipulators would significantly shorten the building time, especially for large-scale parts. However, motion planning (MP) for the dual robot manipulators AM is highly challengeable due to various constraints imposed by the setup and the AM process aiming to improve the qualities of the component, e.g., maintaining travelling speed and posture of the deposition head and avoiding collision. In this paper, a novel pivot-move strategy is proposed for MP in AM with dual robot manipulators. Given the sequenced deposition toolpath segments to each deposition head, an initial MP solution including robot configuration at each time sample waypoint is firstly generated for each robot manipulator, respectively. This is followed by conducting a check-and-correct process at each waypoint, where the collision among the links of two robot manipulators is identified and corrected. Specially, the robot manipulator is designed to simultaneously pivot and move to avoid the collision while maintaining the traveling speed unchanged. Numerical simulation, physical implementation, and benchmarking were conducted to exhibit a 78.295% deposition time reduction and high-quality deposition with the developed strategy. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study represents the pioneering effort in addressing the collision issue in dual robot manipulators depositing on the same heated bed, achieving collision avoidance without interrupting the ongoing deposition process. It can be a valuable supplement to the state of the art in this area.