The project “Factory-in-a-day” aims at reducing the installation time of a new hybrid robot-human production line, from weeks or months that current industrial systems now take, down to one day. The ability to rapidly install (and reconfigure) production lines where robots work alongside humans will strongly reduce operating cost and open a range of new opportunities for industry. In this paper, we explore a method of collaborative fabrication planning with the help of Augmented Reality as part of the concept Augmented Fabrication. In order to plan a new production line, two co-located workers at the factory wear a Microsoft Hololens head-mounted display and thus share a common visual context on the planed position of the robots and the production machines. They are assisted by an external remote expert connected via the Internet who is virtually co-located. We developed three different visualizations of the state of the local collaboration and plan to compare them in a user study.

This work presents a halftoning technique to manufacture 3D objects with the appearance of continuous grayscale imagery for Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) printers. While droplet-based dithering is a common halftoning technique, this is not applicable to FDM printing, since FDM builds up objects by extruding material in semi-continuous paths. The line-based halftoning principle called ‘hatching’ is applied to the line patterns naturally occurring in FDM prints, which are built up in a layer-by-layer fashion. The proposed halftoning technique is not limited by the challenges existing techniques face; existing FDM coloring techniques greatly influence the surface geometry and deteriorate with surface slopes deviating from vertical or greatly influence the basic parameters of the printing process and thereby the structural properties of the resulting product. Furthermore, the proposed technique has little effect on printing time. Experiments on a dual-nozzle FDM printer show promising results. Future work is required to calibrate the perceived tone.

This paper introduces a novel method for designing personalized orthopedic casts which are aware of thermal-comfort while satisfying mechanical requirements. Our pipeline starts from thermal images taken by an infrared camera, by which the distribution of thermal-comfort sensitivity is generated on the surface of a 3D scanned model. We formulate a hollowed Voronoi tessellation pattern to represent the covered region for a web-like cast design. The pattern is further optimized according to the thermal-comfort sensitivity calculated from thermal images. Working together with a thickness variation method, we generate a solid model for a personalized cast maximizing both thermal comfort and mechanical stiffness. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, 3D printed models of personalized casts are tested on body parts of different individuals.

Recently, robots are making their way towards the small and medium enterprises at a quick pace. This is due to market demand and enabled by reduction in costs of robot systems. If robots can be introduced strategically in existing production workflows, productivity could be increased. However, the task division and interaction between human and robot co-workers need to be optimized in order to achieve this. This work-in-progress paper presents a pilot setup to explore such scenarios. We discuss early findings and we present our vision for the future of human robot coproduction.

Increased product complexity and internal team dynamics pose serious challenges to the quality of collaboration, usually reflected upon long delays, cost overruns and poor design quality during product development. Our focus is to study the factors that drive collaboration, shared understanding and team learning in product development in order to investigate new tools to facilitate this process. The present paper provides the theoretical framework to experiment with novel collaborative tools like Augmented Reality in the product development setting. The core argument is that Augmented Reality technologies act as a catalyst to the communication between the various stakeholders. The main idea behind this work is a dynamic investigation on the nature of collaboration in product development teams, through a socio-cognitive lens. The basic focus of this work is to connect insights from the social sciences to collaborative design and visualization technologies.