Abstract: The path planning of large industrial parts in additive manufacturing directly affects manufacturing quality and efficiency.At present, the commonly used traditional path planning methods have many problems, such as turning and stacking of print head and the number of rise and fall of print head, so they are not suitable for large industrial parts.Therefore, an intelligent path planning algorithm is proposed.Firstly, the two-dimensional plane obtained after slicing is concavely convexly decomposed into printing sub-areas, and then the internal long-axis scanning along the partition is performed on each sub-area to reduce the number and length of printing paths.Then, the sub-partition connection is treated as a traveling salesman problem (TSP) using gene-tic algorithms to complete the path planning between the sub-areas.Meanwhile, an intelligent 3D printing path planning system is designed and developed with C# language, which has the functions of slice input and display, print width setting, intelligent path planning and G-code code output.By comparing with the two traditional path planning algorithms, the proposed method significantly reduces the number of paths, the idle travel distance, and the number of print head lifts.The sub-partition-based intelligent path planning method provides a new idea for the additive manufacturing process of large industrial parts.

Key words: 3D Printing, Concave polygonal convex decomposition, Genetic algorithm, Path planning, Traveling Salesman Problem