Data-Driven Adaptive Control for Laser-Based Additive Manufacturing with Automatic Controller Tuning

Closed-loop control is desirable in direct energy deposition (DED) to stabilize the process and improve the fabrication quality. Most existing DED controllers require system identifications by experiments to obtain plant models or layer-dependent adaptive control rules, and such processes are cumbersome and time-consuming. This paper proposes a novel data-driven adaptive control strategy to adjust laser voltage with the melt pool size feedback. A multitasking controller architecture is developed to incorporate an autotuning unit that optimizes controller parameters based on the DED process data automatically. Experimental validations show improvements in the geometric accuracy and melt pool consistency of controlled samples. The main advantage of the proposed controller is that it can adapt to DED processes with different part shapes, materials, tool paths, and process parameters without tweaking. System identification is not required even when process conditions are changed, which reduces the controller implementation time and cost for end-users.