  Recent technological innovations in the areas of additive manufacturing and
collaborative robotics have paved the way toward realizing the concept of
on-demand, personalized production on the shop floor. Additive manufacturing
process can provide the capability of printing highly customized parts based on
various customer requirements. Autonomous, mobile systems provide the
flexibility to move custom parts around the shop floor to various manufacturing
operations, as needed by product requirements. In this work, we proposed a
mobile additive manufacturing robot framework for merging an additive
manufacturing process system with an autonomous mobile base. Two case studies
showcase the potential benefits of the proposed mobile additive manufacturing
framework. The first case study overviews the effect that a mobile system can
have on a fused deposition modeling process. The second case study showcases
how integrating a mobile additive manufacturing machine can improve the
throughput of the manufacturing system. The major findings of this study are
that the proposed mobile robotic AM has increased throughput by taking
advantage of the travel time between operations/processing sites. It is
particularly suited to perform intermittent operations (e.g., preparing
feedstock) during the travel time of the robotic AM. One major implication of
this study is its application in manufacturing structural components (e.g.,
concrete construction, and feedstock preparation during reconnaissance
missions) in remote or extreme terrains with on-site or on-demand feedstocks.
