  The future of 3D printing utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) presents
a promising capability to revolutionize manufacturing and to enable the
creation of large-scale structures in remote and hard- to-reach areas e.g. in
other planetary systems. Nevertheless, the limited payload capacity of UAVs and
the complexity in the 3D printing of large objects pose significant challenges.
In this article we propose a novel chunk-based framework for distributed 3D
printing using UAVs that sets the basis for a fully collaborative aerial 3D
printing of challenging structures. The presented framework, through a novel
proposed optimisation process, is able to divide the 3D model to be printed
into small, manageable chunks and to assign them to a UAV for partial printing
of the assigned chunk, in a fully autonomous approach. Thus, we establish the
algorithms for chunk division, allocation, and printing, and we also introduce
a novel algorithm that efficiently partitions the mesh into planar chunks,
while accounting for the inter-connectivity constraints of the chunks. The
efficiency of the proposed framework is demonstrated through multiple physics
based simulations in Gazebo, where a CAD construction mesh is printed via
multiple UAVs carrying materials whose volume is proportionate to a fraction of
the total mesh volume.
