Software-based compensation of vibration-induced errors of a commercial desktop 3D printer

Commercial desktop 3D printers are designed with light, but flexible, structures and driven with stepper motors to reduce their cost, size and weight. As a result, parts manufactured on such 3D printers suffer from surface waviness and registration errors (caused by stepper motors skipping counts) due to excessive vibration triggered by the motion of the print head or build platform. Such vibration-induced errors not only mar the aesthetics of 3D printed parts, but often lead to highly distorted and hence scrapped parts. The most common solution to this problem, not involving hardware modifications, is to reduce motion speed at the expense of productivity. This paper demonstrates the use of a software-based method called filtered Bsplines (FBS) for mitigating vibration-induced errors of 3D printers without sacrificing productivity. In the FBS method, the motion command sent to the machine is parameterized using B-splines, whose basis functions are filtered using a model of the machine's dynamics. The control points associated with the filtered basis functions are then selected to minimize tracking errors. The effectiveness of the FBS method in mitigating surface waviness and registration errors is demonstrated on parts printed on a commercial desktop 3D printer.