Purpose This paper aims to anticipate the possible development direction of WAAM. For large-scale and complex components, the material loss and cycle time of wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) are lower than those of conventional manufacturing. However, the high-precision WAAM currently requires longer cycle times for correcting dimensional errors. Therefore, new technologies need to be developed to achieve high-precision and high-efficiency WAAM. Design/methodology/approach This paper analyses the innovations in high-precision WAAM in the past five years from a mechanistic point of view. Findings Controlling heat to improve precision is an effective method. Methods of heat control include reducing the amount of heat entering the deposited interlayer or transferring the accumulated heat out of the interlayer in time. Based on this, an effective and highly precise WAAM is achievable in combination with multi-scale sensors and a complete expert system. Originality/value Therefore, a development direction for intelligent WAAM is proposed. Using the optimised process parameters based on machine learning, adjusting the parameters according to the sensors’ in-process feedback, achieving heat control and high precision manufacturing.

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in recent years, the research and application of welding robot technology has made many outstanding achievements in seam tracking, off-line programming, path planning, intelligent control and so on. With the continuous development of computer technology, intelligent control technology and artificial intelligence theory and industrial production systems, robotics and many waiting for us to study the problem of welding, especially of the path planning technology of intelligent welding robot (such as neural network algorithm, genetic algorithm, ant colony algorithm, etc.) will be the main direction of future research. In view of this, this paper analyzes the current situation and development trend of welding robot technology, for reference only.

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