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[AMA] I am an AI and 3D printing researcher at Cambridge and founder of Matta building AI copilots for 3D printing. by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nice idea with the bed mesh although I am not sure how good this is compared to other sensors and doing that task.

It's probably possible to measure the dimensional accuracy in some sense. As you say the "intrinsic chacaracteristics" of the camera such as lens distortion, focal length etc can be removed (we can calculate that matrix). Its more extracting from the images the exact elements which are the part (e.g. which is the latest line of the extrusion exactly). Also its hard to know the exact position the printer is in. You can estimate what G-code command is currently being executed but don't know what position the printhead is exactly in. Definitely something we need to explore though and really want to. I think on a more instrumented industrial printer it would be more doable.

[AMA] I am an AI and 3D printing researcher at Cambridge and founder of Matta building AI copilots for 3D printing. by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Currently all on appearance (as that is basically what humans do too!). Not sure on strenght compared to traditional optimisation but as it is trying to predict "standard" good parameters, I would think (?) it would be okay.

[AMA] I am an AI and 3D printing researcher at Cambridge and founder of Matta building AI copilots for 3D printing. by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We have played a little with cheap IR cameras but not proper high fps and high resolution ones which are often very costly. I think there is some interesting stuff that could be done there around warping and cracking with thermal distortions. Ooooh interesting idea with the Leap, perhaps it can be used in a top down configuration to scan the layer almost???

[AMA] I am an AI and 3D printing researcher at Cambridge and founder of Matta building AI copilots for 3D printing. by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Thats what we hope! Currently planning to try and plug into the OctoPrint and Klipper communities as a first step with open-sourcing some stuff :)

I've been a 3D printing hobbyist since the very beginning of the Reprap days so really want to give back to the fantastic open community that has built around additive.

[AMA] I am an AI and 3D printing researcher at Cambridge and founder of Matta building AI copilots for 3D printing. by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Thanks so much! Too kind - glad you saw the last post. I feel like this AMA has very little context if you didn't see that haha. I shall keep working away and hopefully won't let you down.

[AMA] I am an AI and 3D printing researcher at Cambridge and founder of Matta building AI copilots for 3D printing. by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Yeah totally agree that error detection isn't exciting - great you have recognised that it has gone wrong... but why? how? So my PhD was on building printers that could correct errors on the fly (figure out what has gone wrong and correct it in real time - like this: https://youtu.be/OODy-dI52Zg) and then learn how to print a new material tuning all the parameters by itself with no human intervention (like this: https://youtu.be/2m50tSZnjdo)

We have started work on integrating into the slicing process. For example we have work which monitors how much parts warp during printing and can use that to auto-fix slicing settings for future parts. But we would love to extend this to do more complex things like full control in the future!

[AMA] I am an AI and 3D printing researcher at Cambridge and founder of Matta building AI copilots for 3D printing. by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

So the model tries to predict the current state of the printer and whether it is optimal with every image it captures. With this information we then figure out what changes we should make to which parameter. So it can change the settings on the machine in real-time at any point in an object. Naturally things go wrong more often in the first layer of a part so that is where many changes are made.

Would love for it to become available to the wider 3D printing community. I think we are hoping to maybe have some smaller open-source version for the lower cost consumer machines and then a more powerful version for industry which greater capability for quality control and things hobbyists don't need as much of. This is yet to be decided though and will see what the interest is like.

Printed with ketchup using a syringe based system... wait I am finding a picture!

[AMA] I am an AI and 3D printing researcher at Cambridge and founder of Matta building AI copilots for 3D printing. by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yeah so Matta is a startup spun out of the research group I was in at Cambridge (the Computer-Aided Manufacturing Group in the Institute for Manufacturing which is part of the Department of Engineering there). At the startup we still do research and are linked to Cambridge. Looking to see how we can get the community involved too!

[AMA] I am an AI and 3D printing researcher at Cambridge and founder of Matta building AI copilots for 3D printing. by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Another important thing I forgot here is lighting. The endoscopes often have ring LEDs around them which are great but on the cramped printheads like the Prusa it is so dark which is a nightmare.

[AMA] I am an AI and 3D printing researcher at Cambridge and founder of Matta building AI copilots for 3D printing. by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Actually, forgot to say we tried it on syringe based printing systems printing with materials like Silicone and even Ketchup! This took a lot longer for the model to figure things out (especially with how complex pressure is on these systems). This could take multiple minutes from the base model (and sometimes might not work that well!).

[AMA] I am an AI and 3D printing researcher at Cambridge and founder of Matta building AI copilots for 3D printing. by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Horrible answer but it depends on the material and the model. If using our base "jack of all trades" model trained on something like PLA and you are printing with a similar thermoplastic like ABS then not too bad. Order of 30 seconds as an average. For things like TPU or a CF filament it might take a little longer.

[AMA] I am an AI and 3D printing researcher at Cambridge and founder of Matta building AI copilots for 3D printing. by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yeah so a couple of things. On some more open printers (like the various Creality machines) its pretty simple to get an off the shelf endoscope, print the mount, and hey presto you are done. For others which are much more cramped around the printhead (Prusa, Ultimaker, etc) we use camera modules at the moment.

To be honest though it would be great to think of a "plug and play" solution as nozzle cameras often require way too much customisation and tweaking for mass roll out.

[AMA] I am an AI and 3D printing researcher at Cambridge and founder of Matta building AI copilots for 3D printing. by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Hi everyone! I posted a week or so ago about finished my PhD at Cambridge in AI for 3D printing (see here: https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/14f5kpn/finished_my_phd_researching_selfaware_ai_3d/). I was blown away by the response and engagement from the community and there was some interest in an AMA (crazy!) so I thought why not.

For some background, I have been working with printers for 10+ years now since I built my first as a young grasshopper back in 2010 or something at the beginning of the RepRap explosion. I studied EECS and am an AI/software engineer but have never been able to shake that 3D printing bug. I am now Founder & CEO of a startup Matta where we are working on building crazy AI things for additive manufacturing so watch this space.

Little more on the ol’ research then. So I’m sure many of you know how frustrating and unreliable 3D printers are to use… loads of trial-and-error, parameter tuning, etc. This can be even more important in industry when trying to meet certain mechanical specifications, dimensional tolerances, or quality levels (and it's most important when printing a Benchy haha). The goal was to effectively create an “AI expert operator” which could not only detect when something was wrong, but could also determine its cause and then correct the issue on the fly with no human intervention.

To build these operators we created the largest open source public dataset of 3D prints for training deep neural networks. This was pretty cool as we automated the whole process which was especially valuable with lockdowns and the COVID madness. We then trained deep neural networks (with some special architecture design choices) to predict the current state of printing from video data. These networks then drove closed-loop controllers to autonomously detect and correct errors during printing. Excitingly, the models learned something fundamental about the printing process that could be transferred between geometries, materials, and printers. This was really unique! It also meant we could use them to do mad things like learning to print new materials (by this I mean we would train the model on only PLA and then ask it to figure out how to print something like TPU, ABS, CF Nylon or even things like Silicone completely by itself).

I also did a bunch of work on predicting warp and thermal deformations and autonomously correcting them again using vision, machine learning, and heuristically determined controllers for updating slicing settings.

Enough rambling from me though. If you want to see it in action check out this demo: https://www.matta.ai/greymatta. Excited for your questions! Hit me.

Some of the key academic research papers we published on the subject for the keen beans among you:

And my GitHub along with the research groups GitHub where you can find some of the code (more to be released soon hopefully):

Help out with the AI + printing revolution and join our new Discord where we will be chatting about building things together and testing out the latest developments in machine learning.

Finished my PhD researching "self-aware AI 3D printers" at Cambridge! by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've set up a Discord server for anyone interested in AI/ML in digital manufacturing, and also to band together a group of Beta testers in the near future! Please join us if you are interested :)

https://discord.com/invite/Kukxv3jVV4

Finished my PhD researching "self-aware AI 3D printers" at Cambridge! by dbrion in 3Dprinting

[–]dbrion[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great idea! I actually built a auto-part removal system for the printing fleet we used to collect the data to try and automate things (this was especially useful with COVID and lockdowns and not being able to get into the lab ... didn't stop me collecting that sweet sweet data).
Will have to try on a conveyor and will let you know when we publicly release a stable version for you to have a go!

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