Development of a mobile 3D printer and comparative evaluation against traditional gantry systems

Abstract Fixed robots have dominated the market of additive manufacturing (AM), despite presenting several limitations, such as the stationary nature of these robots and the limited workspace. Mobile robots solve these problems as they can move freely in the printing area without being rooted to the ground. This allows mobile robots to print large-scale structures and print in places that are unsafe for humans to reach and deploy fixed robots. However, mobile robots suffer from poor positional accuracy. In this paper, we present an accurate mobile robot for material extrusion AM and discuss in detail the design of the mobile 3D printer and its components. This work is the first to rigorously compare the quality, accuracy, and mechanical properties of parts printed by the mobile 3D printer against those printed by gantry systems. Results show that the parts produced by the proposed system are comparable to those of a gantry system in certain aspects such as the overall quality and shape fidelity. Additionally, the accuracy exceeded the state-of-the-art of mobile 3D printing achieving low ranges of less than 0.5 mm. Moreover, the proposed system outperforms other plastic 3D printing mobile robots in literature, excelling in both quality and accuracy.