We present a method for fabricating general models with multi-directional 3-D printing systems by printing different model regions along with different directions. The core of our method is a support-effective volume decomposition algorithm that minimizes the area of the regions with large overhangs. A beam-guided searching algorithm with manufacturing constraints determines the optimal volume decomposition, which is represented by a sequence of clipping planes. While current approaches require manually assembling separate components into a final model, our algorithm allows for directly printing the final model in a single pass. It can also be applied to models with loops and handles. A supplementary algorithm generates special supporting structures for models where supporting structures for large overhangs cannot be eliminated. We verify the effectiveness of our method using two hardware systems: a Cartesian-motion-based system and an angular-motion-based system. A variety of 3-D models have been successfully fabricated on these systems. Note to Practitioners - In conventional planar-layer-based 3-D printing systems, supporting structures need to be added at the bottom of large overhanging regions to prevent material collapse. Supporting structures used in single-material 3-D printing technologies have three major problems: being difficult to remove, introducing surface damage, and wasting material. This article introduces a method to improve 3-D printing by adding rotation during the manufacturing process. To keep the hardware system relatively inexpensive, the hardware, called a multi-directional 3-D printing system, only needs to provide unsynchronized rotations. In this system, models are subdivided into different regions, and then, the regions are printed in different directions. We develop a general volume decomposition algorithm for effectively reducing the area that needs supporting structures. When supporting structures cannot be eliminated, we provide a supplementary algorithm for generating supports compatible with multi-directional 3-D printing. Our method can speed up the process of 3-D printing by saving time in producing and removing supports.

This letter tackles the problem of energy-efficient coverage path planning for exploring general surfaces by an autonomous vehicle. Efficient algorithms are developed to generate paths on freeform 3-D surfaces according to a special design pattern as height extremity aware Fermat spiral for this purpose. By using the exact boundary-sourced geodesic distances, the method for generating Fermat spiral paths is first introduced to cover a general surface. Then, heuristics for energy efficiency are incorporated to add peak points of a height field as sources for geodesic computation. The paths generated by our method can significantly reduce the cost caused by gravity. Physical experiments have been taken on different terrain surfaces to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

This article presents an easy, flexible and interactive tool for partitioning a 3D model, which is larger than a 3D printers working volume, into printable parts in an intuitive way. Our tool is based on the elegant partitioning optimization framework Chopper. Our tool aims at improving Chopper by providing users three easy-to-use interactive operations: no-go region painting, cutting plane specification and components reunion. With these operations, we show that (1) exhaustive search in the BSP tree-the most time-consuming step in Chopper-can be avoided, (2) more flexible geometric configurations can be provided, (3) users design intention is considered naturally and efficiently, and customized 3D partitioning results can be obtained. We test our tool on a wide range of 3D models and observe promising results. A preliminary user study also demonstrates its effectiveness and efficiency.

This paper presents a new method to fabricate 3D models on a robotic printing system equipped with multi-axis motion. Materials are accumulated inside the volume along curved tool-paths so that the need of supporting structures can be tremendously reduced - if not completely abandoned - on all models. Our strategy to tackle the challenge of tool-path planning for multi-axis 3D printing is to perform two successive decompositions, first volume-to-surfaces and then surfaces-to-curves. The volume-to-surfaces decomposition is achieved by optimizing a scalar field within the volume that represents the fabrication sequence. The field is constrained such that its isovalues represent curved layers that are supported from below, and present a convex surface affording for collision-free navigation of the printer head. After extracting all curved layers, the surfaces-to-curves decomposition covers them with tool-paths while taking into account constraints from the robotic printing system. Our method successfully generates tool-paths for 3D printing models with large overhangs and high-genus topology. We fabricated several challenging cases on our robotic platform to verify and demonstrate its capabilities.

This paper presents a robotic system - RoboFDM that targets at printing 3D models without support-structures, which is considered as the major restriction to the flexibility of 3D printing. The hardware of RoboFDM consists of a robotic arm providing 6-DOF motion to the platform of material accumulation and an extruder forming molten filaments of polylactic acid (PLA). The fabrication of 3D models in this system follows the principle of fused decomposition modeling (FDM). Different from conventional FDM, an input model fabricated by RoboFDM is printed along different directions at different places. A new algorithm is developed to decompose models into support-free parts that can be printed one by one in a collision-free sequence. The printing directions of all parts are also determined during the computation of model decomposition. Experiments have been successfully taken on our RoboFDM system to print general freeform objects in a support-free manner.