Robotic Arm for 3d printing and allied works for an architectural practice

    Hi, i want a robotic arm for 3d printing- ABB GoFa™ CRB 15000 is something good but its extremely expensive. The next option was UFACTORY xArm 6 but the company is not supportive on accessoires for fitting/mounting the 3d printing unit. I have 3 questions-
    1- Is there an alterative or way i which i can mount a printer to the ufactory arm?
    2- Are there dual extrusion modules that can be mounted on a robotic arm?
    3- For economical reason is it possible assembled one?

    Any comment on way foward would be fantastic!

  • MOM June 30, 2024 at 3:43 PM

    Approved the thread.

    I have no experience with Ufactory, but I have 3D printed with industrial robots using three different brands - Yaskawa, Staubli, and Nachi. I found that I got the best results with Staubli. With the Nachi robot, it was also okay, but with Yaskawa, you need to update a lot of hardware and software in your system in order to communicate with the extruder.

    Does it need to be a Cobot, or a normal industrial robot? What kind of working envelope do you require? Are your primary drivers cost or performance? How much software engineering skill do you have available?

    I did some basic work with mounting a pellet-fed extruder to a Fanuc robot, using the Fanuc gluing option to control the extruder. The extruder had a "smart" motor whose speed could be controlled by the analog output of the gluing software, and the gluing software did a realtime update of the analog output based on the actual velocity of the extruder nozzle.

    Given how complex the interactions between the robot and extruder can be, I'd strongly recommend following a similar route to leverage fully-engineered option packages already available for the robot -- it'll be a lot easier than trying to create something from scratch.

    Which means that robots that don't have such options (like UR, the last time I tried using one), or good tech support, are ones you should probably avoid.

Advertising from our partners