Abstract
The following quote was obtained by the news editors from the background informa tion supplied by the inventors: “Additive manufacturing (AM) production faciliti es are versatile in that they allow production of many varieties of objects havi ng characteristics which are only confined by the specifications of the product designer. In the AM industry physical three dimensional (3D) objects are produce d by means of adding material in layers using mechanical or chemical deposition rather than removing material by mechanical or chemical processes. Objects manuf actured by means of Additive Manufacturing are typically infinitely diverse in g eometry with bounding box sizes ranging from less than 1 mm cubed to more than 4 0 cm cubed. This poses problems when automating production lines as the equipmen t that is used in handling the products cannot be designed in anticipation of an y particular shape or template and therefore needs to solve the general problem for its problem domain specification. Also the materials used in an AM manufactu ring process may be very diverse, ranging from glass to metal to nylon, to flexi ble polymers and therefore pose a similar problem to handling facilities in the sense that in the ideal case of a fully automated n=1 production facility offeri ng a wide variety of material no assumption can be made on the material properti es of the products. Therefore the handling equipment must be designed to solve t he general case of handling the possible varieties of objects. Whereas the produ cts may be very diverse, they may also share common steps in their manufacturing process, such as a curing process and a cleaning process. Other processing step s however are mutually different. For example mutually different objects may nee d mutually different color treatments. This necessitates sorting of objects at t he output of a common processing stage. At least in the final stage, the objects should be sorted for delivery to the customer.
NETL
NSTL