On Experimental Emulation of Printability and Fleet Aware Generic Mesh Decomposition for Enabling Aerial 3D Printing

TL;DR

The paper addresses the challenge of scalable additive manufacturing using autonomous UAVs by introducing an experimental emulation of a generic, chunk-based aerial 3D printing framework. It combines optimization-based mesh decomposition with a BSP-tree–driven task scheduling and seed-chunk heuristics to enable parallelized, multi-UAV printing, coupled with an NMPC-based UAV path-following controller to realize coordinated motion along planned paths. Key contributions include the extension of a chunking framework with seed-chunk heuristics, integration of a responsive task allocation scheme, and demonstration via lab emulation that highlights sim-to-real gaps and practical control considerations. The work lays foundational groundwork for distributed aerial 3D printing of large-scale structures and identifies technological challenges for future validation with material deposition mechanisms and extrusion hardware.

Abstract

This article introduces an experimental emulation of a novel chunk-based flexible multi-DoF aerial 3D printing framework. The experimental demonstration of the overall autonomy focuses on precise motion planning and task allocation for a UAV, traversing through a series of planned space-filling paths involved in the aerial 3D printing process without physically depositing the overlaying material. The flexible multi-DoF aerial 3D printing is a newly developed framework and has the potential to strategically distribute the envisioned 3D model to be printed into small, manageable chunks suitable for distributed 3D printing. Moreover, by harnessing the dexterous flexibility due to the 6 DoF motion of UAV, the framework enables the provision of integrating the overall autonomy stack, potentially opening up an entirely new frontier in additive manufacturing. However, it's essential to note that the feasibility of this pioneering concept is still in its very early stage of development, which yet needs to be experimentally verified. Towards this direction, experimental emulation serves as the crucial stepping stone, providing a pseudo mockup scenario by virtual material deposition, helping to identify technological gaps from simulation to reality. Experimental emulation results, supported by critical analysis and discussion, lay the foundation for addressing the technological and research challenges to significantly push the boundaries of the state-of-the-art 3D printing mechanism.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Conceptual representation of aerial 3D printing UAV during the manufacturing process of chunk $C_3$. The whole construction is decomposed through planar cuts $\Pi_1$ and $\Pi_2$.
• Figure 2: Framework Block Diagram
• Figure 3: Color-coded chunking Results for the rectangle, stacked together forming the decomposed mesh(a). BSP tree $\mathcal{T}$ visualizing the cutting planes $\Pi_1,\dots, \Pi_5$ in the intermediate nodes and the chunks $C_1, \dots, C_{17}$ on the leaf nodes. The printing sequence graph $\mathcal{P}_{ord}$ is extracted at the bottom (b).
• Figure 4: Sequential 3D Plots for chunks $C_0 - C_2$ (a), $C_3 - C_4$ (b), $C_7 - C_9$ (c) of Reference UAV position (blue), Measured UAV position (green), Extruder reference position (red) and calculated Extruder position (orange) during the printing procedure.
• Figure 5: Sequential visualizations of the chunks $C_0$ to $C_{17}$ printing process via real-time data gathered from the motion capture system.