IoT-enabled cloud-based additive manufacturing platform to support rapid product development

Additive Manufacturing (AM) with its unique capabilities provides a new way of rapid product development. The emerging Cloud Manufacturing paradigm makes it much easier to access various AM resources with minimum investment. Distributed recourses can also be utilised more efficiently. However, the current cloud platforms mainly focus on providing simple 3D printing services, rather than support the customers throughout the product development process, from design, to process planning, and to printing. Therefore, a new cloud platform is proposed to integrate not only hard resources such as 3D printers and materials, but also soft resources such as the know-how and test data to provide supports on printing as well as design and process planning. Internet of Things provides new capabilities to the cloud platform, enabling customers to remotely control and monitor the printing process. The paper also examined the feasibility of Artificial Neural Networks for surface defect detection. The platform is able to work in dynamic and iterative product development processes and reduce development time and cost. An illustrative platform is developed to demonstrate the functionalities.