3D printing of medium- to large-scale objects is often limited by the size of the 3D printer - the bigger the desired object, the bigger the 3D printer has to be. To address these limitations, we develop a 3D printing hexacopter that uses fused deposition modeling to deposit polymer materials during flight. Recently, we have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach by successfully printing contours of polylactic acid on a flat surface. Future research focuses on developing advanced control algorithms to improve the 3D printing accuracy.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.02063.pdf
