INSIGHTS
TECHNOLOGY UPDATE: ROBOT PRECISION Laura Moretz, Robotic Industries Association (RIA)
How robots help additive manufacturers add precision Robotics and other technology advances increase accuracy and allow robots to improve precision and make larger parts for additive manufacturing applications.
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obots increasingly facilitate additive manufacturing, enabling efficiency, precision, and the size of created parts. In this growing field, long-time industry leaders and start-up companies improve additive manufacturing (3D printing) results with robots. Two companies that make single-piece components with robotic assistance are Arevo, a Silicon Valley start-up, and Fanuc America. Others also innovate in the field, working to create larger parts and eliminate weak joints. Physik Instrumente (PI), a German company with U.S. headquarters in Auburn, Mass., drills down for sub-micron precision in its parts, which in turn allows additive manufacturers greater precision in additive manufacturing processes.
Figure 1: Smooth surface finish after post processing. Courtesy: FANUC/RIA
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Arevo, launched in 2013 as a start-up, has developed direct digital technology to create strong, lightweight parts on demand for a range of customers. Wiener Mondesir, a co-founder, and chief technology officer (CTO) of the Silicon Valley company, described how its proprietary software, Xplorator, allows the creation of light carbon fiber composites. His partners agreed the “software is really going to unlock a lot of what we’re able to do if we have software that can look at real-world loading conditions and come up with the right fiber orientation.” Xplorator opened the door to the founders’ second objective, which was to eliminate handbuilt procedures. “There had to be a way of doing this in an automated way to give you freedom,” Mondesir said. In 2014, patents were expiring and the maker movement was in gear, he said. Arevo’s next step was to find the best way to build, using software modeling. 3D printing was key to building composite structures. “If we tailored it with the software, we could understand how to orient fibers and build the kind of structure that could meet any kind of predetermined material property or part property,” Mondesir said. “So we built a machine essentially to do that.” The latest iteration is the Aqua 2 carbon fiber printer. Mondesir said the third important thing for Arevo’s development was its materials. 3D printing was first used for prototypes, but now the goal was to print components for production. “In production, there’s a need to understand how that part is going to perform in the real world as far as quality, consistent repeatability, accuracy, dimensional tolerance, and quality assurance,” he said. “So there was a process problem that we needed to address. As a startup, you know, this was a lot to bite and swallow in one go. We were ambitious and decided we wanted to control our destiny” by spanning design to production. After Arevo created its first prototypes, it added robots to provide multiaccess capability and the ability to orient in 3D space. Arevo’s use of carbon fiber composites allows a short turnaround from concept www.controleng.com
