Robot Assisted Additive Manufacturing of Thin Multifunctional Structures

Thin multifunctional structures need to be composed from many different materials. Currently, very few additive manufacturing processes are capable of working with multiple materials. Additive manufacturing processes that work with multiple different materials pose significant constraints on material options. This significantly limits the kind of multifunctional structures that can be produced using additive manufacturing. A robot assisted sheet lamination based additive manufacturing system is developed in this paper. The system utilizes a 6-DOF robotic manipulator to perform the manufacturing operations such as cutting, assembly, tape-layup, and bonding to build the part layer by layer. A flexible ornithopter wing have been built using the proposed system. We have characterized the system in terms of part performance as well as automation efficiency.