Printing Arbitrary Meshes with a 5DOF Wireframe Printer

摘要

Traditional 3D printers fabricate objects by depositing material tornbuild up the model layer by layer. Instead printing only wireframesrncan reduce printing time and the cost of material while producingrneffective depictions of shape. However, wireframe printingrnrequires the printer to undergo arbitrary 3D motions, rather thanrnslice-wise 2D motions, which can lead to collisions with alreadyprintedrnparts of the model. Previous work has either limited itselfrnto restricted meshes that are collision free by construction, or simplyrndropped unreachable parts of the model, but in this paper wernpresent a method to print arbitrary meshes on a 5DOF wireframernprinter. We formalize the collision avoidance problem using a directedrngraph, and propose an algorithm that finds a locally minimalrnset of constraints on the order of edges that guarantees there willrnbe no collisions. Then a second algorithm orders the edges so thatrnthe printing progresses smoothly. Though meshes do exist that stillrncannot be printed, our method prints a wide range of models thatrnprevious methods cannot, and it provides a fundamental enablingrnalgorithm for future development of wireframe printing.