Automation, Controls and Technology News — 3D Printing/Additive Manufacturing

Italian 3D printing company Wasp has unveiled a new printer designed for concrete mortar extrusion. Having previously created printers designed to work with polymer/plastic, clay and massive mortar printers designed for structures, the new Delta Wasp 3MT can be used in industrial applications to produce smaller, concrete items. In addition to their line of printers, Wasp also produces a concrete replacement material called Gaia, a natural mortar made from rice waste and earth. According to Wasp, the 3MT's precision, repeatability and accuracy will aid users in creating complicated geometric designs. By replacing the time it takes for a concrete mold...

Screw Extrusion Additive Manufacturing (SEAM) technology from the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology IWU is a high-speed system that is said to take only 18 min. to produce a plastic component that is 30-cm high. The extruder is installed above a construction platform that can be swiveled in six axes by using a motion system akin to that of a machine tool. Plastic is deposited in layers on the construction platform. The motion system ensures that the construction panel slides along under the nozzle in such a way that the previously programmed component shape is produced. The...

Many 3D vision techniques are used for robot guidance and industrial inspection applications. More often than not, it is necessary to empower robots with the ability to become autonomous, identify, pick and place parts and collaboratively work with human operators. To accomplish this requires that such systems employ a number of machine vision techniques including photogrammetry, stereo vision, structured light, Time of Flight (TOF) and laser triangulation techniques to perform the task of localizing and measuring objects. Figure 1: 6 River Systems’ collaborative automation warehouse robot, known as Chuck, uses TiM LiDAR sensors from SICK to build a map of the environment...