Quality Assurance in Additive Manufacturing Through Mobile Computing

The increase in use of consumer 3D printers for in-home or small business manufacturing may signal the start of an additive manufacturing revolution, but unfortunately these printers are often error prone. In order to remedy the time and materials lost when a failed print continues on a low-end 3D printer, a cost-effective method is needed to monitor the quality of a print and stop it when an error occurs. This paper presents an approach to using a commodity smartphone and computer vision to perform quality assurance on selected layers of a 3D print. Our results indicate that a commodity mobile device using our technique is capable of accurately detecting printing errors and then effectively determining whether or not a print should continue.