Development of WAAM process: slicer, robot trajectories, and examples of parts

Abstract This work is devoted to Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing processing. The question of automatic generation of robot trajectories is mainly addressed. An in-house slicer was first developed. Once the part to be manufactured has been designed and converted into STL format, the slicer allows automatic generation of successive vertices defining the part contours and corresponding robot trajectories. Automatic generation of the robot program is then performed including displacement instructions written in KRL language (case of KUKA robots), as well as commands related to the CMT welding device. The different steps in the offline programming pre-treatment process are first described. In a second step, two distinct parts with increasing degrees of complexity were printed using the corresponding offline programming tool. Finally, the question of the scanning strategy is discussed, the manufactured parts are shown, and required further improvements are explained.