Monitoring Concepts for a 3D Printer Applied to Build a Human Outpost on the Moon

The paper presents the concept of a monitoring system for a 3D printer capable of printing big artifact, which has been successfully evaluated for a possible application for building components of a human outpost on the Moon surface by using the local sand. The monitoring system is designed to allow autonomous detection of eventual faults or decrease of printing performance, in order to early operate suitable countermeasures, by taking into account that the human supervision on the printing operations will be absent or very poor. The monitoring systems exploits an industrial CCD camera positioned above the printing area and directed perpendicular to the layer plane, which collects images of the printing process and computes some performance index on the basis of the comparison to the ideal shape of the area to be printed. Such system has been tested on some preliminary printing experiments and the concepts for further exploitation of the extracted information has been developed.