Toolpath design for additive manufacturing using deep reinforcement learning

Abstract: Toolpath optimization of metal-based additive manufacturing processes is currently hampered by the high-dimensionality of its design space. In this work, a reinforcement learning platform is proposed that dynamically learns toolpath strategies to build an arbitrary part. To this end, three prominent model-free reinforcement learning formulations are investigated to design additive manufacturing toolpaths and demonstrated for two cases of dense and sparse reward structures. The results indicate that this learning-based toolpath design approach achieves high scores, especially when a dense reward structure is present.