Real-Time Object Detection for Smart Connected Worker in 3D Printing

IoT and smart systems have been introduced into the advanced manufacturing, especially 3D printing with the trend of the fourth industrial revolution. The rapid development of computer vision and IoT devices in recent years has led the fruitful direction to the development of real-time machine state monitoring. In this study, computer vision technology was adopted into the Smart Connected Worker (SCW) system with the use case of 3D printing. Specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) models were investigated instead of discrete labor-intensive methods to monitor the machine state and predict the errors and risks for the advanced manufacturing. The model achieves accurate supervision in real-time for twenty-four hours a day, which can reduce human resource costs significantly. At the same time, the experiments demonstrate the feasibility of adopting AI technology to more aspects of the advanced manufacturing.