Mobile Refurbishment by Robot-Based Additive Manufacturing

Stationary molding and casting tools with abrasive defect formation can be repaired using Additive Manufacturing technologies. To automate these repair technologies, robot-based process manipulation is a common approach within the industry. Nevertheless, most process integrations into robot systems lead to a stationary deployment of the repair process, limiting the application only for mobile molding and casting tools. Thus, a mobile robot solution is necessary for the automated repair of stationary tools. A concept for such a mobile robot solution was elaborated within this work. System and process requirements were defined based on the repair application. A compact and mobile 6-axis mobile robot system was designed to manipulate a wire-based Laser Metal Deposition (LMD) repair process. Correspondingly, an electronic supply system and a software-based robot control were designed. A prototype system was built up to generate two- and three-dimensional repair structures as a validation of the robot-based mobile LMD process.