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Full-Text Articles in Mechanical Engineering

Autonomous Material Refill For Swarm 3d Printing, William C. Jones May 2022

Autonomous Material Refill For Swarm 3d Printing, William C. Jones

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

3D printing currently offers robust and cheap rapid prototyping solutions. While standard 3D printing remains at the periphery of mass production, the technology serves as a starting point for the development of swarm manufacturing. Since swarm manufacturing is predicated upon autonomy, swarm technology companies such as AMBOTS are seeking to minimize human involvement in the swarm’s functions. At present, the 3D printing swarm consists of the printers, a transporter which can take them between job sites, and the floor tiles which provide power and support the build surfaces. To add to this ecosystem, this project is focused on the design …


Motor Control Systems Analysis, Design, And Optimization Strategies For A Lightweight Excavation Robot, Austin Jerold Crawford May 2019

Motor Control Systems Analysis, Design, And Optimization Strategies For A Lightweight Excavation Robot, Austin Jerold Crawford

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis entails motor control system analysis, design, and optimization for the University of Arkansas NASA Robotic Mining Competition robot. The open-loop system is to be modeled and simulated in order to achieve a desired rapid, yet smooth response to a change in input. The initial goal of this work is to find a repeatable, generalized step-by-step process that can be used to tune the gains of a PID controller for multiple different operating points. Then, sensors are to be modeled onto the robot within a feedback loop to develop an error signal and to make the control system self-corrective …


Design Of A Scara Based Mobile 3d Printing Platform, Zachary Hyden May 2019

Design Of A Scara Based Mobile 3d Printing Platform, Zachary Hyden

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Currently 3D printers rely heavily on people to run them, there is no automatic way to start a new print after one has finished. On top of this 3D printers are limited in the area they can print on. Even though the additive manufacturing market is rapidly growing and is increasingly being used in product manufacturing there has yet to be a solution to this problem. This research proposes using mobile 3D printing robots to solve both of these issues. The proposed prototype utilizes a Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA) based robot capable of cooperatively manufacturing parts. This allows …


A Scalable, Chunk-Based Slicer For Cooperative 3d Printing, Jace J. Mcpherson Dec 2018

A Scalable, Chunk-Based Slicer For Cooperative 3d Printing, Jace J. Mcpherson

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cooperative 3D printing is an emerging technology that aims to increase the 3D printing speed and to overcome the size limit of the printable object by having multiple mobile 3D printers (printhead-carrying mobile robots) work together on a single print job on a factory floor. It differs from traditional layer-by-layer 3D printing due to requiring multiple mobile printers to work simultaneously without interfering with each other. Therefore, a new approach for slicing a digital model and generating commands for the mobile printers is needed, which has not been discussed in literature before. We propose a chunk-by-chunk based slicer that divides …