<p><i>This paper presents a decentralized approach based on a simple set of rules to carry out multi-robot cooperative 3D printing. Cooperative 3D printing is a novel approach to 3D printing that uses multiple mobile 3D printing robots to print a large part by dividing and assigning the part to multiple robots &nbsp;in parallel using the concept of chunk-based printing. The results obtained using the decentralized approach are then compared with that obtained from the centralized approach. Two case studies were performed to evaluate the performance of both approaches using makespan as the evaluation criterion in two different cases. The first case is a small-scale problem with four printing robots and 20 chunks, whereas the second case study is a large-scale problem with 10 printing robots and 200 chunks. The result shows that centralized approach provides a better solution compared to the decentralized approach in both cases in terms of makespan. However, the gap between the solutions seems to shrink with the scale of the problem. While further study is required to verify this conclusion, the decrease in this gap indicates that the decentralized approach might compare favorably over the centralized approach for a large-scale problem in manufacturing using multiple mobile 3D printing robots. Additionally, the runtime for the large-scale problem (case II) increases by 27-fold compared to the small-scale problem (case I) for centralized approach whereas it only increased by less than 2-fold for decentralized approach. </i></p>

Enabling Multi-Robot Cooperative Additive Manufacturing: Centralized vs. Decentralized Approaches

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2021/volume/85369

ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2021)

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