Name: Lighter, Stronger, Sooner: Accelerating UAV Development with Protolabs & HP
Uploaded: 2026-05-21T19:15:07.758Z
Duration: 1 h 15 min
Description: Lighter, Stronger, Sooner: Accelerating UAV Development with Protolabs & HP

Transcript for "Lighter, Stronger, Sooner: Accelerating UAV Development with Protolabs & HP": Hey. Welcome. My name is Carter Frazier. I'm here at Proto Labs. We're gonna we're gonna be joined by Doug Nicklin here, and this will be our webinar, lighter, stronger, sooner, accelerating UAV development with ProLabs and HP. A little introduction about myself. I'm the customer production success manager at ProLabs, for our three d printing technologies. Before that, I was manufacturing engineer, specifically working with SLS and MJF. So, and that and have been at Proto Labs for almost eight years now. Doug, perfect. Thank you, Carter. So I'm Douglas Nicklin. As you stated, I'm the unmanned systems lead for HP Additive Manufacturing. So we have our centers of excellence in Barcelona, Spain, as well as where I'm from in Vancouver, Washington and Corvallis, Oregon. That's where the, development design and iteration cycles for MJF occur within HP in The US. And I've been here with HP for nine and a half years now. So almost the entire life cycle of our additive industry. Great. So today, we'll be, we'll we'll each take a turn here and and first talk kind of some broad advantages of additive manufacturing and drone development. What are some of the things you can be thinking about? Where does that fit for you and your products? And then Doug will have a case study, that HP has of some some parts that really show the value of additive manufacturing and how that can be incorporated in your design. And after that, we'll have some q and a time. So additive manufacturing, where does it fit into drone development? So, wanna talk about this kind of in terms of three main lanes. Right? You can take it you can take advantage of it in terms of, your materials. You can take advantage of it in terms of your your design your design process, and then I wanna talk through at the end what does that look like in terms of how should you be designing should you be designing for injection molding ultimately even if you're using three d printing along the way? What where should where should your mind be as you're thinking about your products? So within that, where can you use three d printing in production beyond beyond just prototyping? I wanna focus on three main lanes today. So design complexity and light weighting, that can enable new applications. There will be custom customizability, new product variance, subvariance of products, things like that, and then reducing your components. So we'll talk first about design complexity, lightweighting. So, this is, I think, one of the things that people first think about when they think about adding manufacturing. This is one of the the the famous advantages that you can use is, you know, mass reduction. So if you think about additive, ultimately, every single piece of the part has to be made, additively. And so what that means is that complexity is free. That's something that people will say sometimes. And so, you know, a piece like that that you can see on the screen where even you have something like chain mail, that may be as cost effective as if that piece was just a solid block. And really leaning into that, that can start to have big impacts for your range, for the endurance of the, the drone, for how and for how far, you know, that that object might be able to fly and for how long. And with some technologies, you can print very thin walls that maybe you couldn't make via other manufacturing processes. Now that also allows you to do things like design creatively around vibrations, around, you know, things like you could build a spring directly into your part. Right? Things like that. That that may not even add any cost. It's actually just something that you can do very easily via added manufacturing. Or even start thinking in terms of complex solutions for thermal management, electronics integration, you might be able to have multiple components as we'll talk about in in a second combined into one piece. So another aspect here, customizability. What that can enable, that can enable a lot of things. That can enable new product brands faster, right, that there's a shorter time to market, but also maybe you have certain subregions of your products that you want to have, you know, different payloads, different motors, different electronics, and different versions of the product. And so what that might allow is you could have one larger assembly that maybe in production uses more traditional manufacturing methods. But for that sub area of the part where you expect to have a high variability of your components, maybe that component is always added additively manufactured and you could have dozens of variants of that one component that you can do reasonably cost effectively because you're not looking at having to make tooling for those parts or things like that. So, yeah, this is another area where even if you have a drone that maybe is largely going to be injection molded or is going to be carbon fiber, maybe there's some specific components within that that do make sense to do via the long term. And then the last design element that I wanna talk about is, component reduction. So what does that mean? So, you know, you can think of if you have this design flexibility, can you start to can you start to think of whole regions of, your part that could be combined into one where instead of having five different components that you need to assemble together, maybe you just design those as a single piece. If all those could be could be made and then you you would still have all the accessibility to do, you know, your hardware assembly, things like that, putting in electronics, you could put your whole fuselage as a single component potentially. And that can be that can lead to a lot of benefits. Right? That can be fewer components that you need to keep in stock. That can reduce your tolerance stack. Right? You no longer have to think about how are all these components gonna meet together, thinking about what does the gasket look like between those or something like that. Well, it doesn't matter. Right? It's a single component now. So there's there's a tremendous amount of benefit here even down to things like spare parts. Right? If you can combine that whole area down where it would be five units down to one or maybe even 50 down into one, then that's just that's way fewer components that you need to have unique identifiers for. You need to stock, you need to keep in the field, things like that. So materials. So there's a couple options here. I wanna talk kind of high level first, maybe some traditional materials you might think of in drones, carbon fiber composites, fiberglass, foams, things like that. They have different pros and cons. Maybe they're less durable. Maybe they have higher durability than others. But lots of times, even for something like carbon fiber, there might be a huge investment of upfront tooling to get that produced. When we think about adding the manufacturing, you're looking at, you know, there's obviously a lot of plastics that we'll talk about here in a sec. Some of those are higher cost. Some of those are lower cost. Some of them are higher strength, lower strength. But there are also metal options. Right? There's there's DMLS components that, you know, materials like aluminum and titanium that you may think, well, those are very heavy materials, and that's true. But they're also extremely high strength, And you can design those components to be lightweight in their design even if on a pure material density basis, they are heavy. And then lastly, this obviously isn't a material, but we'll talk briefly on Cerakote as a secondary finishing option. And that's that can have a lot of advantages in terms of colors. It can, you know, it can provide UV stability if this is a drone that's gonna be used over the course of many years. And, and that can just provide another layer of protection. So plastics. So a couple kind of ranges here, right, in terms of and it may depend where you're at in your product development cycle, which makes the most sense for you. So something like, you know, an FDM PLA, right, is super low cost. I mean, people are doing that in their garage. Probably a lot of people, I'm sure, have experience with this. That's great for our first prototype, but that may not be a great solution long term. If you're, you know, instead thinking this is a component that I expect to injection mold, I'm just doing some form, you know, fit testing. This isn't really a true flight part and use part. There's lots of SLA options that will behave and look, you know, initially like a injection molded, material, and that can enable you to have the tight tolerances that you would expect, you know, after a fully validated production mold. And that and that can be a great a great option for doing your initial prototypes as well. Then you can get into obviously more durable, FBM materials, ABS, PTG, things like that. You're gonna start having better impact resistance. They'll still be pretty low cost, but, again, may still only be moderate durability. And then you get into nylons, right, which you can start making via a number of technologies, SLS, MJF. These will be now getting to be extremely durable in the way that these technologies can be, can be leveraged in terms of either their lack of supports, things like that, that enables a whole, whole new range of, design considerations, design flexibility that we'll demonstrate here in here in a moment. And then quickly a little more on the metal side, titanium and aluminum, these are just there's these aren't the only materials out there, but these are what we see most commonly in aerospace and in the drone industry. Right? These are extremely strong materials on a strength to weight ratio, and there's a lot of opportunities for very complex designs, obviously, for these technologies. These are what I would recommend for your sort of highest criticality, highest strength components, right, that you're you're willing to to use that weight or we see these things on we see this in things like nozzles, things like that, or for, obviously, larger assemblies, larger drones. So, yeah, this is another thing to to be thinking strategically about. When does it make sense to go all the way to a metal component? And then I wanna touch quickly on Cerakote. Cerakote's obviously this is not a material. This is a ceramic coating that goes on the outside of a part, typically on plastics, although we can do it on metals as well. And this and this will provide a UV stability long term, and it's also good for color matching. Right? If you have a very particular color, Cerakote can be any color. The thickness of this material is very, very small, so it adds a very small amount of weight to your part. And there's even options for, low reflectivity, versions of Cerakote, that that that can be applicable in many circumstances as well. So and I wanna touch quickly now on before we transition on what are the what should you be thinking about as you're designing these products. Right? It's very helpful to identify early how are you intending to produce this product long term. If this is a component that you expect will move into injection molding one day or soon, then you should be designing with that in mind. You know, quick quickly check even if you're not at the stage of, of, you know, needing that tooling cut, you know, PerLabs is a great partner for you to evaluate. Is this a component that right now can be injection molded eventually? Because what you don't wanna do is you don't wanna design a product around three d printing that you never intended to keep at in additive manufacturing long term, and then find out, well, this actually is not a moldable component. This is this is not something that can be injection molded, and now you're going back to the drawing board again. You have to re prototype. So it's always important to be validating your design against your end use production technology, whether that's injection molding or whether that's additive manufacturing, whether that's something else. Right? Make sure even if you're using three d printing early to do your prototypes, make sure that whatever it is you're designing towards, that it will that it will work for that too. Generally speaking, if your part is going to be injection moldable, it will probably be something that you can three d print to. The reverse is not always as true. And then lastly, what I would say though is if you are thinking about additive manufacturing in production long term, then go all in. Right? Don't just say, okay. Well, this works well enough, but start asking questions around, can I do further light weighting? Can I remove material in places? There's a lot of opportunity to achieve, advanced capabilities that can only be accomplished via added manufacturing. And, you know, if you're not if you're not taking advantage of those, then what's the point? At a certain point, you need to be saying, what what do I need to do to make my design more, successful in this application space using the technology method that I'm using to produce the part? And I'm gonna hand it over now to Doug who has some great case studies of that. Yeah. Perfect. Thank you again, Carter. So kind of bouncing everything that that Carter kind of said, the overall aspect side of HP's positions within the drone market and in particular in the additive manufacturing is built on the similar pillars. We build ourselves on the pillars of light weighting, on scalability, and time to market. So all the same pillars have been mentioned kinda in a in a different terminology, but similar structure. One of the core things he he mentioned was it's similar in the process to SLS. So main difference between for those unfamiliar between SLS, it's a point based process, so power bed with point. HP, we leverage our two d industrial manufacturing capacity. We did that for the past ten years now, so we're an area print process. So we are a powder bed. We use an area of jetting, so we place billions of droplets of agent across the bed during each pass, detailing and fusing. That gives us a high resolution capability as well as, high throughput. So instead of being a point. So based on build, z height is all that matters, for our duration. Each pass happens within ten seconds, so packing density does not add anything, further into the process. So diving into it with the concept drone. So what does it mean when we talk about the lightweighting, time to manufacture, and scalability? The concept drone was something HP developed to really push the limits of what we can do with our technology. We saw about two years ago, customers were entering into the ecosystems, developing drones through our contract manufacturing partners, as well as leveraging in house methodology. Many of the designs we'll say were crude. They're based on converting systems that were already developed in FDM directly into the SLS and MJF processes. So they weren't taking in the the capabilities that these technologies really can accelerate. So we started working internally to develop methods to find better lightweighting processes. For those that remember on the forty two hundred years ago, our guidance was two millimeter wall thickness. Then we started dropping on the 5,200 to 1.2 millimeter wall thickness. Now with the drones, like the concept s drone here, we achieved that at point five millimeters and since the third iteration of that, we're already down to point four. So our goal is to continually push the envelope as what is capable with that light weighting. With regards to that lightweighting, we leverage technologies like computational design, fluid dynamic design processes to get the structure as thin as possible and maintain the rigidity. The the concept drone leverages a hybrid methodology. So we still use carbon rods because they're very easy to obtain, very easy to scale, which gets into the next pillar I'll get into. So those can be managed appropriately and and converted into a final product. The reduction in development time is something that we also did wanna push the envelope on with the concept test drone. So we had this system. We bought a phone drone from China, took it in house, monitored, basically reverse engineered if you wanna say that, but redesigned it completely from the ground up to achieve capabilities and additive manufacturing again. During the first iteration, we did not know what we were going to be able to path our way into. That product ended up taking about 1.3 builds, took hours of of, computational design to get into. And then also anywhere from about forty five minutes to two two hours to build. So getting that time to market. The iterations we did over three months because the additive manufacturing process, it's it's designing for manufacturing from the ground up. We went from a prototype design to a production design within those iterations. So by the third design, which you see here in the photo, it was achievable that we got into a system that was only three fasteners, four carbon rod main structures, three carbon rods that were designed just for kind of, improvements for battery packs so you can have different configurations of those batteries. And then we push the envelope from that to see if we can go from that 1.3 builds to compact this down as possible. So this gets into the scalability. So instead of having the the system be designed for, low volume production, we we took that methodology and could we achieve what's the highest achievable volumes we can have from this in one system? So we our design engineers are able to break this down into basically Lego pieces. 13 unique SKUs is what our goal was at the time. We right now, we're at 19, and that is being put into a bucket that's, half a build volume. So in one bill, we can produce two of these drones at a time and achieving about 1,200 drones per year on per printer. Assemblability time now is down to about five to fifteen minutes with some practice. And now the system, airframe wise itself, is less than 500 grams. We're we're still trying to target some even more weight improvements on that side. And as you can see on here, it's a one and a half meter drum, so not an insignificant size. So, again, reiterate on those core principles of lightweighting is with the performance, scalability is what we terminology to cost, and then time to market. So with that, the the performance aspect side of it came into we tested it on iteration two, found challenges, different seasons. We we ended up having a, a component manufacturer disappear on us. They they no longer were making the component we needed. We're in an additive process. We're in an additive design group, digital designs. We were able to redesign on the fly within about half an hour of finding a new supplier, new dimensions for the component we had. We reengineered the interior of the of the drone itself to handle that new component, and we placed in there under computational design, and we're able to get that system fully back into a production capability within that afternoon. Scalability and cost is kind of what we said on here already. Based on it being a modular design, it's it's capable of design iterations. So we don't anticipate any major external shapes or changes required on that side. Only things are now on the interior structures and then having that iterative process for multiple skews for different electronics, different battery components, different motors, different wire runs. And then time to market, we really did push for this to be achievable at scale. And what I mentioned with that is the digital duplication. We've proven the concept through our process engineering. This was designed and developed at Barcelona, Spain. Now we've confirmed we've printed it here with Proto Labs, but we've printed it at a number of our other contract manufacturers, printed it internally at different systems in in our three different regions, APJ, EU, and The US, all with success. So we have confirmed that this design works as a digital duplication platform to get this time to market at the point of need. And, again, now that we get into the the big question of why. Why why did we approach this for the additive manufacturing process versus standard design? Well, first off, this was a it was a foam drone. So we didn't know if we could achieve better targets, better performance, any of that compared to a phone drone. We had a process we thought we could, but until we until we got off the ground running, that's where we stepped into this, process, stepped into this engineering cycle that we got into. So at the very beginning, we took a foam drone, backed it out, took the core components out, developed it into a system. Our goal was to achieve the lightweightness of the foam drone with the structural strength of a composite, And we hit those targets very easily. That during our even our first iteration, we were well exceeding that. We were within about 18% light weighted compared to the to the foam drone right off the bat, which kinda shocked us. We then started doing the lightweighting optimization parameters on that to get it even lighter. So that's why I said right now we're at point four millimeter design, so that drops the weight of the entire wingspan to less than a 180 grams. For us the complexity we didn't know. We didn't build foam drones before. We did not know what the complexity, the the tooling necessity, or any of that components of what a foam drone were compared to what we could do with a three d manufactured system. So once we had that process, we developed the endoskeleton to the structure. We optimized the platform for that endoskeleton. And once we had our first iterations, we could see what our outcomes were. We could either get we got 30% increase range comparatively. We reduced the weight of the overall structure, and then we also still had a a weight reduction in the general components. So what does that mean for capabilities? That gives you extra battery capacity if you wanted to. That 30% weight reduction, 30% more payload if you're going to payloads. Bigger motors if you want to have higher speeds, larger batteries for extended range, modifications to the platform for the operation that you want to run with this. For us, this was just a camera drone. It's just designed to to record, like, in an ISR environment locally into region. So you can see, you can operate, you can safely safely operate it in the territories you are. And then this allowed us to move into the next phases of of our optimization. So getting to the final part, the scalability. So how this, how additive manufacturing really allowed us to explore scaling. Was this opportunity allowed us to see what the market had? We knew the carbon rods were available. We knew the substructures were available. We knew the tooling that was necessary was minimal. You didn't need skilled labor to build these things. I built this in, like, fifteen minutes after after the first time I saw it. So being easily trained and operated, you you don't need skilled labor to to develop a composite, to develop a a a foam structure, to do all these other key areas. And once we had the build profile set up, we knew what the packages were going to be necessary to build the system, then you could explore the scaling. Again, I stated before, we built these in platforms across the world. The systems then multiply with the number of printers that you have capable. If you can source the rods, you can source the components. They're your tier ones. Then just to build these, you just need to do minor modifications, scale it with a factory, and either scale it in house with with industrialization or then go to partners with contract manufacturing that have the large scaling capability worldwide. K. So that kinda leads into everything I have to say on on the factor of the the core principles we had. So we had the the design for light weighting, the design to scale, and the design to time to market. We have a lot of activity within the ecosystem as a whole. We see a lot of customers having that principle in mind, but they're not designing for manufacturing from the beginning. They're designing for, product life cycle. They're designing for their initial prototypes, their initial runs, their initial achievements, but they're not designing for that capability to get these out at massive numbers. So thank you for joining us. Hopefully, we'll get some questions coming in. Alright. Well, we have one from Dennis. I didn't see a mention of FDM printing with nylon. I've had great results for the accuracy and extremely thin walls in FDM printing nylon. Yes. Absolutely. You can you can FDM print with nylon. One of the considerations that I would have with that is even if you can have extremely thin walls, you're still dealing with a supported technology. Right? At the end of the day, I would I would certainly say, and I'm I would think Doug would agree that when you're talking about larger volumes, FDM does not scale well. Right? With an MJF printer, you could print I mean, it's gonna decide and depending on the size of the component, but you might be able to print, you know, potentially even hundreds or at least dozens of that same component in the same amount of time, with an MJF printer. Right? So so like I said, as an initial prototyping phase, FDM is great, but as you're reaching scalability volumes, you're likely going to need another technology. Yeah. And and same Amplify on top of that, FDM has great capabilities. You can get down to very thin walls, but now you're talking about your build speeds or or days, if not high into the hours. Structural framing slouch as this, this build volume is built within about a nine and a half hour build time to produce two of these drone systems. Alright. One from Aaron. What is the most comparable injection molding material to HPS MJF PA 12? My answer would be a PA 12. PA 12 is an is an it's at the end of the day, this is a nylon 12. This is not a nylon 12 like material. It is a true nylon 12. And, you know, so anything that you would expect in terms of, you know, chemical resistance or things like that, it's gonna be the same. Right? It's at the end of the day, that is the exact same feedstock as would be used in injection molding manifold. Yeah. And it's basically we're we're molding in place. It's a power bed process, so we're melting into the power bed. Main difference basically you can say is, MJF process is isotropic in the impact resistance near isotropic with stretch. So comparing it with the tensile strength between injection molding and MJF PA 12, Injection molding has a has a superior tensile strength. Yep. That's a great call. I'll take this one. It says, what was the skin thickness of the wing parts as when the internal structure uniform? Did you optimize the wall thickness and seal? So I can show you here if we can see on the screen. So you can see the toning on here. Inside the wings, this is the fuselage capping portion. So same structural design as the wingspans, but just much easier to represent on camera. So we leverage point four millimeter thickness skin walls, and then they're substructured either with a computational design, so we use a Boolean topology to generate a about point eight millimeters lattice structure around it with, areas where we know that we're gonna have snap fit functionality, component placement, things like that that we will go up to the guidelines of what we normally say is 1.2 millimeters. Those those are the areas for your SNAP fit functionality to have that tensile strength and repeatability and complete modular design on it. So, wings overall they're they're designed to be thin skinned across the entire ecosystem, but they are a lattice to improve the structural strength. Alright. Next one from Aaron. What are some of the wildest Cerakote options you've seen on MJF parts? Does wing skin thickness of 0.4 millimeters need to be taken into account? So I would say while this absolute I mean, there's there's an amazing amount of colors. Right? You can go on to Cerakote and see just the full palette of of color options, but ultimately, that gives a lot of, freedom to, you know, have a uniform color product. But there also as I said, there are even options for things that are, you know, UV UV blocking, UV masking, Cerakote options. I don't know if, Doug, if you have any others that you've you've seen. Yeah. Let's only UAV space. So similar things on there, what people are doing for UV, UV attenuation, a little bit of weatherization because, the the product itself is designed to be water impermeable but doesn't mean like oils and stuff like that will still go through. Contaminations in water so even though rain is water it still has dust, it still has other micro particles inside of it that can leverage there. So that's why Cerroco becomes an awesome choice in that. The wildest areas I've seen have mostly been in the UUV space. So deep submergence, ecosystems where these activities are going to be staying for very long durations or very long operability cycle. So they're achieving capabilities in those environments that that surprised me to this day. I I I would not have factored in that this would have held up as long as it has in those environments and in particular with the Cerakote process. It kinda shocked me. I I didn't really I did not see Cerakote being as flexible as it was, but once you start getting into the ultra thin, it really doesn't flake or or break off inside of those deep, high pressure environments. And then the other part was, does wing thickness? The only thing on there is that's kind of where we get into the targeted side of how much to apply. So most of the Cerakote process we ask when we work directly with Cerakote on these processes, we add about one to 2% maximum weight to the overall structure by applying a thin layer mostly for aesthetics or for, fingerprint management. We want something that's not gonna to to transfer oils, things like that into the product. And the thinner you go, the the system the Cerakote process still does require heat. So that's where we see. Point four is where we know that our mechanical properties are still, managed during that heat cycle process of Cerakote. Once we get less than that, that's where we kinda get into more of the, the one offs designs. Not sure what the question is there. Yeah. Getting fingerprints and smudges and things like that. Then I also saw one that says, can you tell us about any exciting developments material wise with MJF? That is kind of the unique one. I can't get into the specifics, but I can tell you where we we put a lot of effort into. Because of the MJF process, it is a multi material process. So for some of those that were aware either at Rapid or saw some of the products through Exponential or it's even probably a lot of our LinkedIn or applications team has already put out there. We do have the capability to do dual tone. For those that have been MGF loyalists for a little while, you're familiar. We had a color system, the the 500. That team that leveraged that capability is able to leverage that on our on our MJF line. Right now, it's leveraged on the, 54 hundreds, the white system. By leveraging the white system with the, black fusing agent instead of the low tint fusing agent we are able to get dual tone representation on our structures. So you can put instructions on there, you can put load points, you can control the amount of droplets going to a specific area and and we're starting to explore that similar to those that work with us on ESD components or work with proto on ESD. You can get some attenuation and conductivity through the system. And for those kind of aware of that in the UAV space, nylon 12 is completely transparent to RF, but as you start really injecting it with a material that has, high carbon count into it, you start getting into that realm of being able to attenuate RF signals. Alright. Well, I think if we don't have any others, any other questions coming in, just to reiterate, per labs is a great place to, to come if you're looking both for prototyping and production. We have injection molding services, CNC services, and of course, three d printing services. And again, there's a lot of opportunities for designing in light weighting performance, things like that into your drones. So, hopefully, this was educational. Hopefully, people that joined learned a little bit more and have a broader view of, capabilities that they may be able to take advantage of with this technology. Alright. Thank you. Thank you all.