With the rapid development of powder-based additive manufacturing, depowdering, a process of removing unfused powder that covers 3D-printed parts, has become a major bottleneck to further improve its productiveness. Traditional manual depowdering is extremely time-consuming and costly, and some prior automated systems either require pre-depowdering or lack adaptability to different 3D-printed parts. To solve these problems, we introduce a robotic system that automatically removes unfused powder from the surface of 3D-printed parts. The key component is a visual perception system, which consists of a pose-tracking module that tracks the 6D pose of powder-occluded parts in real-time, and a progress estimation module that estimates the depowdering completion percentage. The tracking module can be run efficiently on a laptop CPU at up to 60 FPS. Experiments show that our depowdering system can remove unfused powder from the surface of various 3D-printed parts without causing any damage. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first vision-based robotic depowdering systems that adapt to parts with various shapes without the need for pre-depowdering.

翻译：随着粉末基增材制造的快速发展，除粉——即去除覆盖在3D打印部件表面未熔融粉末的工序——已成为进一步提升其生产效率的主要瓶颈。传统人工除粉方式极其耗时且成本高昂，而现有部分自动化系统或需预除粉处理，或缺乏对不同3D打印部件的适应性。为解决这些问题，我们提出一种能自动清除3D打印部件表面未熔融粉末的机器人系统。其核心组件为视觉感知系统，包含实时追踪粉末遮挡部件六维位姿的位姿追踪模块，以及评估除粉完成百分比的进度估计模块。该追踪模块可在笔记本电脑CPU上以高达60 FPS的效率运行。实验表明，我们的除粉系统能够清除多种3D打印部件表面的未熔融粉末，且不会造成任何损伤。据我们所知，这是首批无需预除粉处理即能适应不同形状部件的视觉驱动机器人除粉系统之一。