Quality control in additive manufacturing (AM) depends heavily on manual visual inspection. This will become a significant barrier for industry when companies are trying to scale up AM from prototyping to small patch and mass production. In the current paper, we present a setup suitable for automated quality monitoring tailored for AM and initial validation of the system. First, the paper describes the implementation of a chosen machine vision solution for monitoring part quality (e.g., surface quality) of AM objects. Then, we will proceed to present the results of two pilot studies focusing on evaluating the accuracy of the inspection of the system for both polymer and metal prints. Finally, we will discuss the possibility of integrating the system into an existing Industry 4.0 platform and the benefits the system can bring for automated part quality inspection for AM production lines.
Huhtanen et al. (Thu,) studied this question.