Fully Three-Dimensional Toolpath Generation for Point-Based Additive Manufacturing Systems

While additive manufacturing and 3D printing achieved notoriety for their abilities to manufacture complex three-dimensional parts, the state of the art is not truly three-dimensional. Rather, the process plans for the majority of these machines rely on a stack of discretized, two-dimensional layers, which results in parts with stair-stepped surfaces, as opposed to being smooth and freeform. This work proposes a change to the 2.5D paradigm by using a configuration space approach to enable toolpath planning in a full three-dimensional space, allowing movements beyond planar slices. Algorithms are also presented to compute toolpaths on non-planar regions. Since the toolpaths take part and machine geometries into account, they are guaranteed to be collision-free. These techniques are relevant to many additive manufacturing technologies, including fused deposition modeling (FDM), directed energy deposition (DED), material jetting, and nozzle-based variants. The result of implementing nonplanar toolpaths is smoother, more continuous part surfaces.Mechanical Engineerin