A Human-Centered Intelligent Platform for Holographic Control and Management of 3D Printers

Under the wave of emerging human-centric concepts such as Industry 5.0 and Human-Centered Intelligent Manufacturing, Mixed Reality (MR) has emerged as a pivotal enabling technology with profound impacts on human-machine interaction. Simultaneously, the affordability of Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D printers has expanded their accessibility beyond industrial applications to homes and public spaces. However, the operational and management complexities of different 3D printers and their varying human-machine interfaces (HMI) present challenges for users, especially beginners. In this paper, we presented a human-centered intelligent platform for FDM 3D printer control and management enabled by Mixed Reality. A flexible system architecture is developed in the paper with two essential communication protocols, MQTT and WebSocket, for stable data transfer. In addition, a task-oriented HMI is explored on the MR headset to simplify the operation procedure with little training effort and allow parallel supervision of multiple machines. By leveraging the advantages of our architecture, real-time monitoring, failure detection, and hologram visualization were able to be integrated into our platform for intelligent operation and management. Importantly, the flexibility of the architecture via a holographic interface enables our platform to easily expand to various machining operations in the future. (c) 2024 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)