TY - JOUR
T1 - A Nozzle Path Planner for 3D Printing Applications
AU - Fok, Kai-Yin
AU - Ganganath, Nuwan
AU - Cheng, Chi-Tsun
AU - Iu, Herbert Ho-Ching
AU - Tse, Chi K.
PY - 2020/10
Y1 - 2020/10
N2 - Additive manufacturing technologies have been widely applied in both household and industrial applications. The fabrication time of a 3D printed object can be shortened by optimizing its segments printing order. The computational times required by existing nozzle path planning algorithms can increase rapidly with the number of printing segments. In this work, the nozzle path planning problem is formulated as an undirected rural postman problem (URPP) and a computationally efficient heuristic search algorithm is proposed to find fast routes and mitigate overheads in printing processes. Both simulation and experimental results concur that the proposed algorithm can significantly speed up printing processes and outperform its counterparts in 3D printing applications.
AB - Additive manufacturing technologies have been widely applied in both household and industrial applications. The fabrication time of a 3D printed object can be shortened by optimizing its segments printing order. The computational times required by existing nozzle path planning algorithms can increase rapidly with the number of printing segments. In this work, the nozzle path planning problem is formulated as an undirected rural postman problem (URPP) and a computationally efficient heuristic search algorithm is proposed to find fast routes and mitigate overheads in printing processes. Both simulation and experimental results concur that the proposed algorithm can significantly speed up printing processes and outperform its counterparts in 3D printing applications.
KW - 3D printing
KW - additive manufacturing
KW - undirected rural postman problem (URPP)
KW - heuristic search
KW - path planning
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85077254061&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - https://www.scopus.com/record/pubmetrics.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85077254061&origin=recordpage
U2 - 10.1109/TII.2019.2962241
DO - 10.1109/TII.2019.2962241
M3 - RGC 21 - Publication in refereed journal
AN - SCOPUS:85077254061
SN - 1551-3203
VL - 16
SP - 6313
EP - 6323
JO - IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
JF - IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
IS - 10
ER -
