Heuristic Kinematics of a Redundant Robot-Positioner System for Additive Manufacturing

A kinematical redundant robotic system is developed for laser aided additive manufacturing (AM). The eight-axis robotic system composed of a six-axis robot synchronizing with a two-axis positioner. For the developed robotic system, the post-processing of an AM path is a challenging problem due to the functional and intrinsic redundancies. A profuse kinematic model of the robotic system is required during the development of dedicated offline programming (OLP) software. In this study, a heuristic kinematic analysis is conducted for the robotic system to address the redundant problem considering the special requirements and constraints of the AM process. With the developed model, a postprocessor is programmed into an internally-developed OLP software package. An example is presented to show the effectiveness of the kinematic model and application of the OLP software.