Design of Adaptive Porous Micro-structures for Additive Manufacturing

AbstractThe emerging field of additive manufacturing with biocompatible materials has led to customized design of porous micro- structures. Complex micro-structures are characterized by freeform surfaces and spatially varying porosity. Today, there is no CAD system that can handle the design of these microstructures due to their high complexity. In this paper we propose a novel approach for generating a 3D adaptive model of a porous micro-structure based on predefined design. Using our approach a designer can manually select a region of interest (ROI) and define its porosity. In the core of our approach, the multi-resolution volumetric model is used. The generation of an adaptive model may contain topological changes that should be considered. In our approach, the process of designing a customized model is composed of the following stages (a) constructing a multi- resolution volumetric model of a porous structure (b) defining regions of interest (ROI) and their resolution properties (c) constructing the adaptive model. In this research, the approach was initially tested on 2D models and then extended to 3D models. The resulted adapted model can be used for design, mechanical analysis and manufacturing. The feasibility of the method has been applied on bone models that were reconstructed from micro-CT images

Multi-robot spot-welding cells: An integrated approach to cell design and motion planning

The necessity to manage several vehicle models on the same robotized assembly cell has made the cell design and the robot off-line motion planning two fundamental activities. Industrial practice and state-of-the-art methods focus on the technical issues of each activity, but no integrated approach has been yet proposed, resulting in a lack of optimality for the final cell configuration. The paper introduces a formalization of the whole process and proposes a heuristic multi-stage method for the identification of the optimal combination of cell design choices and motion planning. The proposed architecture is depicted through a real case for welding application

Multi-robot spot-welding cell design: Problem formalization and proposed architecture

The multi-robot cell design for car-body spot welding is faced by industry as a sequence of tasks, where researches are focused on issues of the problem as a whole. In authors’ knowledge, none work in literature have suggested any formalization for the complete process. This paper tries to bridges the gap proposing coherent process formalization, and presenting a corresponding innovative architecture for the automatic optimal cell design. Specifically, the formalization involves the identification and allocation of the resources in terms of a set of decisional variables (e.g. robot model/positioning/number, welding gun models/allocation/number, welding point allocation etc.); then, the design optimization process minimizes the investment costs granting the cycle time. The multi-loop optimization architecture integrates both new algorithms and existent procedures from different fields. Test-bed showing its feasibility is reported

Multi-sensor multi-resolution data fusion modeling

Inspection analysis of 3D objects has progressed significantly due to the evolution of advanced sensors. Current sensors facilitate surface scanning at high or low resolution levels. In the inspection field, data from multi-resolution sensors have significant advantages over single-scale data. However, most data fusion methods are single-scale and are not suitable in their current form for multi-resolution sensors. Currently the main challenge is to integrate the diverse scanned information into a single geometric hierarchical model. In this work, a new approach for data fusion from multi-resolution sensors is presented. In addition, a correction function for data fusion, based on statistic models, for processing highly dense data (low accuracy) with respect to sparse data (high accuracy) is described. The feasibility of the methods is demonstrated on synthetic data that imitates CMM and laser measurements

Validation of an extended approach to multi-robot cell design and motion planning

According to both industrial practice and literature, multi-robot cell design and robot motion planning for vehicle spot welding are two sequential activities, managed by different functional units through different software tools. Due to this sequential computation, the whole process suffers from inherent inefficiency. In this work, a new methodology is proposed, that overcomes the above inefficiency through the simultaneous resolution of design and motion planning problems. Specifically, three mathematical models were introduced that (i) select and positions the resources, (ii) allocate the tasks to the resources and (iii) identify a coordinated robot motion plan. Based on the proposed methodology, we built three ad-hoc cases with the goal to highlight the relations between design, motion planning and environment complexity. These cases could be taken as reference cases so on. Moreover, results on an industrial case are presented

Design and motion planning of body-in-white assembly cells

This paper proposes a method for the automatic and simultaneous identification of the body-in-white assembly cell design and motion plan. The method solution is based on an iterative algorithm that looks for a global optimum by iteratively identifying the optimum of three sub-problems. These sub-problems concern system layout design and motion planning for single and multi-robot systems, while collision detection is addressed. The sub-problems are handled through ad-hoc developed Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) models. The proposed solution overcomes the limitations of the current design and motion plan approaches. In fact, the design of body-in-white assembly cell and the robot motion planning are two time-expensive and interconnected activities, up to now generally managed from different human operators. The resolution of these two activities as non-interrelated could lead to an increase of the engineer-to-order time and a reduction of the solution quality. Thus, a test bed is described in order to prove the applicability of the approach

ESDA2008-59025 EXTENDED GEOMETRIC FILTER FOR RECONSTRUCTION AS A BASIS FOR COMPUTATIONAL INSPECTION

ABSTRACT Inspection of machined objects is one of the most important quality control tasks in the manufacturing industry. Contemporary scanning technologies have provided the impetus for the development of computational inspection methods MOTIVATION One very important task of concern to the manufacturing industry is inspection of manufactured parts. At the end of the manufacturing process, a produced part must be verified to determine whether it fits the designed CAD model under given tolerances. Modern manufacturing is characterized by high rates of production and increasingly complex products. Therefore, the main inspection demands are high accuracy and speed. Manual inspection is expensive, time consuming and often inaccurate. Automatic inspection is faster and free of human errors. Hence, a fully automatic process providing fast and accurate inspection is required. This is especially important in the era of globalization, where a production process may be distributed over several sites (countries) and where the professional skills of employees are different at each site. Using a fully automatic inspection system eliminates these problems and leads to standardization of the inspection process. Contemporary scanning technologies have provided the impetus for the development of new automatic computational inspection methods applied on scanned objects. These methods are used to reconstruct the computer model of the manufactured object from a set of the scanned points and then to verify it against design computer model. Nevertheless, reconstruction of the scanned object is problematic. The scanning process is affected by a variety of factors, such as scanner defects, camera vibrations, etc. Assuming a linear model, the effect of such factors can be described by an observation matrix H, which encodes both the characteristics of the scanning device and the parameters of the scanning environment. Assuming, in addition, additive noise N, the scanning process can be described by the following equation: where: Y -vector of properties of a scanned point; H -scanning observation matrix; X -vector of properties of an object point;