Support Generation for Robot-Assisted 3D Printing with Curved Layers

Robot-assisted 3D printing has drawn a lot of attention by its capability to fabricate curved layers that are optimized according to different objectives. However, the support generation algorithm based on a fixed printing direction for planar layers cannot be directly applied for curved layers as the orientation of material accumulation is dynamically varied. In this paper, we propose a skeleton-based support generation method for robot-assisted 3D printing with curved layers. The support is represented as an implicit solid so that the problems of numerical robustness can be effectively avoided. The effectiveness of our algorithm is verified on a dual-material printing platform that consists of a robotic arm and a newly designed dual-material extruder. Experiments have been successfully conducted on our system to fabricate a variety of freeform models.