Automated 3D Printing can Revolutionize the way Robotics Competition Teams Manufacture Parts

*SNAP*

It’s the sound that every robotics competition student dreads: the snap of a part breaking, signaling its need to be replaced.

Defining the Problem

Most robotics teams have spare parts prepared before a competition or will?hurriedly manufacture some with stock material at the event’s machine shop. Such was my experience when competing at FIRST competitions as a student of FRC 4903 and a mentor of FTC 16397 over the last 5 years. I vividly recall one competition where my FRC team replaced a plastic lever on a mechanism 6 times. Lucky for us, we made exactly 6 spares. In hindsight, it would have been better to redesign the part, but we didn’t have the time or resources to do so mid-competition.

3D printing is being increasingly used by student robotics teams to generate custom parts easily. As more teams adopt the technology, it’s becoming clear that a team’s 3D printing potential can be stunted by a lack of experienced members available to repair and maintain printers, set up prints, and remove finished parts. To improve, teams need better printer management tools that can take care of such mundane tasks so they have more time to focus on what really matters: gaining engineering design skills.

FTC 16397 Relatively Quantum’s Armaan Sengupta scraping custom 3D printed parts from his team’s printer

Enter Automated 3D Printing

What robotics teams need is a 3D printer that starts a print with predetermined settings, produces the print, ejects the completed part, and starts up the next file to be printed. This process would repeat until all queued files have been produced. In other words, they need an automated solution. Automated 3D printing would allow robotics competition teams to streamline their prototyping process and fast-track the manufacturing of emergency parts at events.

Automated printing can transform a team’s capabilities in many ways:

1. Parts can be designed and manufactured anytime, anywhere.?All you need is a connection to a computer with the print automation management software. Picture the mechanical sub-team slicing the parts they designed at their meeting after school, queuing them up onto their automated printer, and simply returning the next day to find all the parts done and ready to assemble. Students can even VPN into the printer and print a list of parts from home if an idea comes to mind. Automated printing would allow them to go to school the next day with all the parts ready to be tested.

2. All members can have efficient access to 3D printing technology.?If a team has a 3D printer, it is often entrusted to a few students who have extensive experience with 3D printing. This immediately creates a bottleneck; the printer can only be run by a few members and only when they are physically with the machine. With end-to-end automated 3D printing, downtime and parameter setup time is avoided, allowing all members to print designs in an efficient manner by adding their parts to the printer’s queue.

3. Members with experience have more time to pass on their skills to others.?Robotics teams often benefit from having interdisciplinary members that understand how the mechanical, electrical, and software subsystems of a robot come together. When using an automated 3D printer, members with 3D printing experience have time to teach their team how to design and slice parts to print — time they used to spend setting the printer up, calibrating it, and scraping off parts. All students can add their parts to the queue and practice their design skills.

4. Mentors have peace of mind knowing students can use 3D printing safely.?One of the biggest setbacks to a team is when tools are out-of-order or pose a safety risk. This stalls the prototyping process and forces teams to put aside some of their precious build season time for troubleshooting. With automated 3D printing, teams would have more confidence in their printers as they don’t require any physical contact or calibration to keep them running effectively. Mentors can also rest assured that parts can be made safely by students of varying ages and experience levels as the technology is contactless.

5. An investment that becomes a budget saver.?Automated printing saves teams time and money by enabling them to manufacture in-house. Failed prints due to a buildup of calibration errors over time can be avoided, which saves money on filament.

6. A team’s capacity to make parts increases dramatically.?Teams that can make high volumes of parts typically have more than one printer or have enough time/manpower to manage them. Continuous printing is possible with an end-to-end automation kit for 3D printers; the only limitation to a team’s printing power is knowledge, files, and filament. This is priceless for 3D printing outreach, where teams teach classes or host events that require high volumes of impromptu 3D printed parts. Being able to quickly part manufacturing during the crunch-time of build season is also important. A team can queue 200 branded pins to be made or print a 40 part mechanism all in one go.

7. Teams can cut downtime during the prototyping phase.?Many teams will use old mechanisms or cardboard to begin prototyping during the start of build season in the hope that they may get a working idea while they wait for parts to come in. This method is not the most exact and can be wasteful. A team may make cardboard brackets and put them into production without testing a more rigid prototype, then find out their design doesn’t work. Now they have wasted stock material and time. If teams had automated 3D printing, they could print plastic versions of most of their parts to configure into different mechanisms without worrying about volume; the technology takes care of the production for them. These parts are more exact when assembling mechanisms and can be reused each season to fast-track the prototyping process before manufacturing metal components.

8. Join the shift to modular robotics.?Industry leaders in robot platform development are moving towards creating standardized 3D printed parts for their robots that can be rearranged to accommodate unique components based on?a recent Forbes article. Building robots this way can save teams time and money. If this design ideology is paired with autonomous 3D printing to produce the high volume of parts required, teams can multiply their throughput without adding complexity to their process.

A Vision for the Future or for Today?

I cannot speak to the value this technology would provide robotics teams without touching on the practicality of automation in 3D printing. Today, automated 3D printers tend to be made for industrial usage. They are very expensive, massive in size, and have yet to provide end-to-end automated printing. Such systems are not accessible to young designers and 3D printing enthusiasts in general….or so I thought.

Through my current internship experience at 3DQue Systems, I have been working with a tool that solves this dilemma and could change the way robotics competition teams build their robots. Quinly is a 3D printer hardware and software upgrade that enables full end-to-end automation for commonly used 3D printers like the Creality Ender 3 and the Prusa MK3S. Moreover, the Quinly kit is an affordable tool for robotics teams, enabling them to work with industry-grade technology that adds no complexity to their 3D printer. A practical solution to a practical problem.

Quinly for Ender 3 by 3DQue Systems

Looking at a Real-World Example

Suppose a team is 3D printing brackets to hold aluminum extrusion at a 20° angle. The goal is to have a stock of 20 of these brackets ready for prototyping mechanisms before the season’s game and rules are released. Let’s use the following STL as an example of such a bracket to explore the production time of traditional 3D printing when compared to autonomous 3D printing using Quinly.

Assume a new 1kg roll of PETG filament is loaded onto the 3D printer. For this task, a total of 800g of PETG is needed, so the roll should not need to be changed while printing in either case. For this example, one angle bracket will be printed at a time with all 20 parts produced on the same printer.

With autonomous printing, each part should take 2.35 hours to complete; this includes the print time, cool-down time (without a fan), ejection from the bed, and heating up phase for the next part. All 20 parts will be done in approximately 47 hours or 1.96 days. The printer will not be touched during this period of time, so no additional maintenance work or calibration should be needed. Since printing is autonomous, the job can be started at any time.

Quinly for Prusa MK3 printing the aforementioned tilt bracket continuously

If traditional 3D printing is used, each part will take 2.1 hours to print, plus some time between prints to cool the bed, scrape the part, start the next file, and heat the printer back up. If Quinly automates these steps in 15 minutes, then allocating 20 minutes for a team member to do these processing and setup tasks manually is reasonable as they may not be physically with the printer when the part is ready to be removed. This brings the total time to produce each part to 2.43 hours.

Most students attend classes from 8am to 3pm, and robotics members may stay another 2 hours after school to work on their robot. Within that time, 4 parts can be made (with the last one being removed the next day). It would take at least 5 days for a team to finish all 20 parts if no printer maintenance needs to be performed. In the 3 extra days that it takes teams to print the old-fashioned way, they could be using an automated system to produce more parts and get ahead in their prototyping process.

Final Thoughts

There are several ways a robotics team can improve: they can recruit more members, increase their budget, or gain experience through years of competition. The quickest way to increase the quality of a robot is through enabling members to gain relevant skills and practice through the best technology. Automated 3D printing is the next step for robotics teams looking to take their prototyping abilities to the next level, and Quinly can help them take that next step.