Compensation strategies for robotic motion errors for additive manufacturing (AM)

It is desirable to utilise a robotic approach in additive manufacturing as Computer Numerical Control (CNC) is expensive and it has high maintenance costs. A robotic approach is relatively inexpensive compared to CNC and can provide much more flexibility, enabling a variety of configurations and easier parallel processing. However, robots struggle to achieve high positioning accuracy and are more prone to disturbances from the process forces. This paper attempts to characterise the robot position and velocity errors, which depend on the build strategy deployed, using a laser speckle correlation sensor to measure the robotic motion. An assessment has been done as to whether these errors would cause any problem in additive manufacturing techniques, where the test parts were built using the Wire+Arc Additive Manufacture (WAAM) technique. Finally, different compensation strategies are discussed to counter the robotic errors and a reduction of 3 mm in top surface profile irregularity by varying the wire feed speed (WFS) during the path has been demonstrated.