Students from Virginia Tech’s DREAMS lab have succeeded in building a 3D printer annex production installation on which a drone can be completely printed and completed. As soon as the last screw has been tightened by the robot, the drone flies away from the printing platform.
Impossible to fully print a drone? The students of the Design, Research, and Education for Additive Manufacturing (DREAMS) Lab, led by Professor Chris Williams, initially thought so too. Drones are complex products consisting of many parts. Some parts such as the battery and the motor cannot be 3D printed. But assembly is not the function of a typical 3D printer. And if you’re going to 3D print anyway, how do you get the drone loose on the build plate so that it can fly away by itself?
Is this the future of additive manufacturing?
3D print head on a robotic arm
The first solution developed by the students of the American university is the integration of a 3D print head on a robot. “Connecting a print head to multi-axis industrial robotic arms gives us extra degrees of freedom that finally allows us to print in real 3D,” explains Professor Williams. “Instead of simply stacking a series of two-dimensional impressions of each layer, the robotic arm’s kinematic flexibility allows us to deposit material in any direction in 3D space.” The robot arm also offered the opportunity to integrate other tools, for example for the assembly of parts that cannot be printed. While the body of the drone is being printed, the robot arm will place the parts such as motor, batteries and the wiring harness.
Playing with temperature building plate
But how do you ensure that the drone remains firmly on the build plate during production, but comes loose easily when it starts flying? The solution the students came up with is actually quite obvious. Printing is done on a large, heated building plate. If the plate cools down by a few degrees after 3D printing, the bond will become weaker. Once the plate has cooled to a certain point, a simple mechanical scraper could be used to push the plate away. This approach works. The student team adapted the entire installation, made parts and programmed a lot for the robot 3D printer. After numerous failed attempts, we finally managed to print the robot and then fly it away from the building plate immediately afterwards, without intervention.
NASA funds student project with $75,000
Scale up for production
In the meantime, the student team, together with a post-doctoral researcher, has scaled up the entire concept to a larger-sized robot. “Using what we learned, we designed the new cell for tools with standard interfaces and power requirements and developed a control system that can operate any size robot arm,” explains Joseph Kubalak, the researcher who supervised the team.
Future of additive manufacturing
In a subsequent project, the students want to create a production cell in which several robots work together on a single drone. Chris Williams sees this as the future of additive manufacturing. “It is time to move beyond printing static parts in prefabricated boxes and consider ways to integrate 3D printing technology into advanced manufacturing workflows to enable the creation of truly multifunctional products.” NASA could use such a concept to produce drones for specific missions or for on-demand drone production. It is not for nothing that the student project was supported by NASA with an initial $75,000 and later another $40,000 by a consortium of companies including Boeing, Northtrop Gumman and Stäubli.
If you want to know more: here you will find the article that the students have published for peer review
And here you will find a video about the project