Abstract
Multi-process, or hybrid, additive manufacturing is an emerging technique to fabricate multi-material soft composite structures with applications in soft robotics. Combining multiple existing additive manufacturing modalities such as fused filament fabrication, direct ink writing, and embedded 3D printing allows the fabrication of ultra-soft composite structures with much lower manual intervention and lead time compared to traditional labor-intensive casting and assembly methods. However, the lack of a streamlined and user-friendly method to generate numerical control programs for such multi-process additive manufacturing workflows imposes a high barrier to entry for widespread adoption by the soft robotics community. In addition, the intermediate processing step of establishing a reservoir for embedded 3D printing remains manual in nature in previous work on embedded 3D printing or multi-process additive manufacturing for composites. This thesis focuses on developing novel tools and fabrication strategies to apply multi-process additive manufacturing in the field of soft robotics. First, modifications made to the existing open-source software package Slic3r to adapt it for automated CAD-to-G-code use in multi-process additive manufacturing workflows are presented. Second, an application example is presented where a previously manually fabricated soft whisker-like sensor was fabricated using multi-process additive manufacturing. Finally, the design and fabrication of an attachment to automate the spreading and leveling of embedded 3D printing reservoirs within molds is described. Experimental results to measure the performance are presented for each of the three proposed improvements.