A professor at the University of Houston's Cullen College of Engineering has received more than half a million in funding from the National Science Foundation to refine and streamline cooperation efforts between robotic 3D printers.
Yisha Xiang, an associate professor in the Industrial Engineering Department, is the PI for an NSF proposal, “Integrated Framework for Cooperative 3D Printing: Uncertainty Quantification, Decision Models, and Algorithms.” The $505,789 award will cover research through 2026.
Xiang's research is focused on advancing data analytics and decision-making methods for the efficiency of the novel cooperative 3D printing (C3DP) technology. According to the project's abstract, a critical barrier to the widespread adoption of additive manufacturing (AM) technologies has been slow printing speeds, leading to excessive printing times for large parts.
C3DP utilizes a fleet of printhead-carrying mobile robots to perform printing jobs cooperatively, significantly improving scalability and reducing print time. Effective methods for operational control of these systems must consider the accuracy degradation of mobile printers, which can lead to cascading effects in product quality and production efficiency, as well as various uncertain factors in the printing process that makes scheduling for C3DP extremely challenging.
The research team identified three goals for the research:
- Create advanced statistical machine learning models for positional accuracy prediction of robot printers and inference of hidden conditions, facilitating timely maintenance of robot printers.
- Develop a suite of stochastic optimization models using dynamic chance constraints for maintenance planning, production scheduling, and collision-free routing.
- Validate and demonstrate the research methods through proof-of-concept experiments at their research labs, computational simulations, and collaborations with industrial partners.
Successful development of these models and algorithms will potentially transform AM into a new, ultra-efficient era of automated 3D printing.
Co-principal investigators for the research are Wenchao Zhou, an associate professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Arkansas; and Harsha Gangammanavar, associate professor in Operations Research and Engineering Management at Southern Methodist University.
Xiang joined the Cullen faculty in Fall 2022. She earned an NSF CAREER award in 2020 for her research proposal, “Enhancing Environmental and Economic Sustainability of Additive Manufacturing-Based Remanufacturing.”
For more information on Xiang and her research, visit her lab's website.