The increasing automation of modern systems—across industry, healthcare, mobility, and beyond—has raised the demand for human reasoning and expertise, while alleviating the burden of repetitive tasks. This transformation is driving us toward Automation 5.0, a new paradigm aimed at unleashing human potential. Recently, the development of foundation models (FMs) has reinvigorated its realization, making it both urgent and critical to explore the concept of Automation 5.0 in this new era. In this article, we define Automation 5.0, discuss its significance, and emphasize its new world, thinking, and technology with the goal of achieving knowledge automation. A framework, based on business FMs, human-oriented operating systems, and scenarios engineering, is proposed, where biological, robotic, and digital humans work together in three modes: autonomous, parallel, and expert/emergency modes. Additionally, a diverse range of its scenarios and applications are summarized and discussed, such as Manufacturing 5.0, Healthcare 5.0, and Transportation 5.0. We believe that Automation 5.0 can drive the co-evolution of productivity and production relations across all domains, propelling society toward a “Safety, Security, Sustainability, Sensitivity, Service, Smartness (6S)” future.

Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is an additive manufacturing process capable of producing intricate structures with high accuracy. Despite this capability, it struggles to achieve the required reliability for mass production—specifically the stability of a production run and repeatability across multiple runs. Parameter optimization, which adjusts process parameters to regulate a specific quantity of interest (QoI), is a crucial means of quality control. Existing methods, however, have not adequately addressed both random and systematic factors in the LPBF process. The stochastic nature of the process is often neglected under the assumption that identical parameter inputs will consistently yield the same QoI. This deviates from reality and is not intended to reduce potential variations in the QoI. Moreover, many studies do not incorporate the systematic neighboring effects between scan tracks into their optimization, so process reliability cannot be guaranteed. To address this issue, this study focuses on optimizing the probability distribution of the QoI. The key idea is not only to increase the likelihood of achieving the ideal QoI but also to reduce its variance. This is achieved by uncertainty-aware modeling and optimization of the LPBF process using machine learning. Specifically, the problem is formulated as maximizing the posterior distribution of scan parameters given an ideal QoI sequence and historical manufacturing data, yielding a large-scale constrained optimization problem. A stochastic, distributed, gradient-based method is proposed to solve this problem, where a coarse-to-fine strategy plays a critical role in accelerating convergence. A case study is then conducted to stabilize the melt pool volume by optimizing laser powers. The solutions are verified in a calibrated finite element-based simulation environment, in which the variations of the melt pool volume are effectively reduced both within a single run and across multiple runs. The implementation of our method is available at https://github.com/qihangGH/uncertainty_aware_param_optim_for_AM.

The widespread adoption of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing is hampered by process unreliability problems. Modeling the melt pool behavior in LPBF is crucial to develop process control methods. While data-driven models linking melt pool dynamics to specific process parameters have shown appreciable advancements, existing models often oversimplify these relationships as deterministic, failing to account for the inherent instability of LPBF processes. Such simplifications can lead to overconfident and unreliable predictions, potentially resulting in erroneous process decisions. To address this critical issue, we propose a probabilistic data-driven approach to melt pool modeling that incorporates process noise and uncertainty. Our framework formulates a problem that includes distribution approximation and uncertainty quantification. Specifically, the Gaussian distribution with higher order priors, aided with variational inference and importance sampling, is used to approximate the probability distribution of melt pool characteristics. The uncertainty inherent in both LPBF process data and the modeling approach itself are then decomposed and approximated by using Monte Carlo sampling. The melt pool model is improved further by using a novel grid-based representation for the neighborhood of a fusion point, and a neural network architecture designed for effective feature fusion. This approach not only refines the accuracy of the model but also quantifies the uncertainty of the predictions, thereby enabling more informed decision-making with reduced risk. Two potential applications, including LPBF process planning and anomaly detection, are discussed. The implementation of our model is available athttps://github.com/qihangGH/probabilistic_melt_pool_model. Note to Practitioners—Modeling the melt pool behavior in laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) processes is pivotal for enhancing its quality control. However, a problem is that most existing data-driven melt pool models learn melt pool behavior with a deterministic function, which predicts the same outputs if its inputs are the same. This deviates from the reality and neglects the uncertainty in LPBF processes. As a consequence, the quality control methods based on such melt pool models lack required reliability. In response to these challenges, this work proposes to model melt pool behavior by using probability distributions with deep learning techniques, which can quantify the uncertainty in both LPBF process data and data-driven models. Aided with an elegantly designed representation for the neighborhood of a fusion point as model input, and a neural network architecture that fuses multi-modal data, the proposed model achieves accurate melt pool size prediction results. More importantly, this work quantifies and decomposes the prediction uncertainty. By accounting for noise and parameter variations, the probabilistic modeling models developed herein offer a more robust foundation for LPBF quality control than the existing ones. They can be readily applied by practitioners to perform improved process planning, defect prognosis, and real-time anomaly detection tasks.

3-D printing, or additive manufacturing (AM), leverages 3-D computer-aided design models and numerical control to produce objects layer-by-layer, playing a key role in Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0. Despite its potential to revolutionize manufacturing by creating complex structures more efficiently and cost-effectively, 3-D printing still faces quality issues due to a lack of sufficient data, resulting in improper process parameter settings and poor analyzability. This work introduces a data-driven and physics-assisted machine learning (DP-ML) approach for a 3-D-printed BeltClip object, integrating finite element analysis (FEA) and physics-informed machine learning (PIML). The proposed DP-ML framework provides a cost-effective and time-efficient data collection method using Digimat-AM and a warpage classification algorithm. The data collection begins with obtaining the STereoLithography (STL) file of the BeltClip object from Thingiverse and slicing it in Ultimaker© Cura, considering process parameters such as infill amount, toolpath pattern, layer height, print speed, and extrusion temperature. The resulting G-code file is then input into Digimat-AM for further parameter setting and analysis. In Digimat-AM, glass fiber-filled and unfilled material types are set, undergoing the virtual 3-D printing process, followed by a warpage analysis of the printed BeltClip. The collected 3-D printing data is used to build ML models—deep neural network (DNN), decision tree (DT), support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR), and random forest. The DNN contains three architectures—DNN-1, DNN-2, and DNN-3. Based on the metrics of precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy, DNN-3 outperforms the others and is chosen for the warpage classification algorithm. The presented DP-ML approach is compared with the state-of-the-art methods and shows a promising capability to predicting warpage, optimizing process parameters, and improving the overall quality and efficiency of a 3-D-printed BeltClip.

Recently, multi-layer perceptron-based implicit representations have achieved remarkable successes in hand modeling. Compared with previous explicit mesh-based representation methods, implicit methods are more compact shape representations. However, it is expensive to obtain explicit geometry surfaces from implicit functions with Marching Cubes, which limits the real-time performance in surface reconstruction applications. To explore a more effective and efficient hand representation, we present a skeleton-driven method to represent a human hand with a point cloud. To achieve this goal, we propose a Tri-Axis Modeling method to model the motion pattern of the xyz coordinate of a patch of point cloud, and an Order Encoding strategy to construct a parameter-sharing and geometry-disentangled network. These two effective strategies make our method run in real-time and has super-high fidelity close to implicit methods. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on public datasets demonstrate the efficiency, effectiveness, and robustness of our method against state-of-the-art approaches.

Additive manufacturing (AM) can build up complex parts in a layer-by-layer manner, which is a kind of novel and flexible production technology. The special manufacturing capability of AM shows great application potential in various fields. However, an open-loop control method cannot guarantee the reliability and repeatability of an AM process. Defects often occur to deteriorate product quality and lead to material and time waste, which hinders the development of AM industry. In this regard, a lot of efforts have been made to make an AM process more controllable. This work proposes an AM control framework that divides the related studies into three feedback loops, including the in-situ monitoring of process defects, fault diagnosis of 3-D printers, and closed-loop control of an AM process. These three loops constitute the inspection and control of AM from the machine level to product level. Specifically, the measurement requirements for monitoring techniques, defect detection, fault diagnosis, and closed-loop control are summarized. The challenges and future trends in realizing a more reliable and repeatable AM process are discussed. Note to Practitioners—This survey is motivated by urgent need to solve product quality problems in additive manufacturing (AM) caused by open-loop control. Three feedback loops can be established to solve them. The first one is defect detection that inspects part quality during fabrication. The second one is the fault diagnosis of a 3-D printer that monitors the health and operation conditions of its actuators. The last one is closed-loop control that improves AM process reliability and repeatability by regulating process variables in real time. These three loops are all based on the feedback signals of in-situ monitoring systems. This paper reviews the related studies and provides guidance for establishing the monitoring systems, performing defect detection and fault diagnosis, and designing closed-loop control systems, which helps realize more reliable and repeatable AM.

Multiview 3-D reconstruction holds considerable promise across a wide applications in social manufacturing. Conducting in-depth research on precise and robust multiview 3-D reconstruction holds the potential to significantly empower the domain of social manufacturing. Recently, there has been a burgeoning interest in the domain of neural implicit surfaces learning through volume rendering for the purpose of multiview reconstruction without 3-D supervision. Conventional approaches often overlook explicit multiview geometry constraints, resulting in shortcomings in generating consistent surface reconstructions and recovering fine details. To solve this, we propose geometry-guided neural implicit surface (GG-NeuS), a geometry-guided neural implicit surfaces learning method for multiview surface reconstruction. Our model places a stronger emphasis on maintaining geometry consistency, significantly enhancing the quality of reconstruction. First, we enforce multiview geometry constraints on the surface points by locating the zero-level set of signed distance function (SDF). Second, we incorporate normal cues, predicted by general-purpose monocular estimators, to substantially recover fine geometric details. Additionally, we introduce a voxel-based surface reconstruction methodology that strikes an optimal balance between training time and reconstruction quality. Through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experiments and analyses, we demonstrate thatGG-NeuSsuccessfully reconstructs fine-grained surface details and achieves superior surface reconstruction quality than state-of-the-art approaches.

Additive manufacturing (AM), also called 3-D printing, is a supporting technology in social manufacturing that has gained significant attention recently. As the AM industry grows, collecting and analyzing data are essential to ensure product quality, process efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. However, obtaining experimental data is challenging owing to cost and time constraints. Therefore, cost-effective and time-efficient strategies for collecting AM data are urgently required. This study proposes a novel data-collection approach that integrates the concept of finite element analysis (FEA) and physics-informed machine learning (PIML). We begin by discussing the importance of data collection in AM and the associated challenges. We then present various types of data that can be collected in AM, including the 3-D models and end-to-end data. End-to-end data comprise experimental data (i.e., sensors and images) and simulation data. Moreover, we present a case study that demonstrates the generation of simulation data and provides a detailed analysis of warpage. The STereoLithography (STL) file format of the BeltClip object from the Thingiverse possesses slicing through the Ultimaker© Cura software. The resulting G-code file is input to the Digimat-AM platform for virtual simulation of the BeltClip printing process. Digimat-AM, as a FEA simulation tool, then generates observational sample data. These data function as a roadmap for understanding the application of physical information for learning, which constitutes the observational bias aspect of PIML. The observational data obtained from the Digimat-AM is suggested for building a machine-learning model. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of inductive and learning biases in the prediction, control, and optimization aspects of AM.

Digital light processing (DLP) is a popular additive manufacturing technology that uses light irradiation to fabricate 3-D devices via a projector to achieve laser-sensitive resin curing. However, the performance and reliability of DLP can be affected by internal defects such as printing errors and the accumulation of residual stress. Existing defect detection methods rely on monitoring the printed parts, which leads to resource wastage and struggles to effectively handle imbalanced defect data. In this article, we propose a defect detection method called dual neural network, which involves detecting defects in materials before the printing process to prevent resource wastage and serious consequences. Specifically, to handle the highly imbalanced class distribution problem in online DLP defect detection, dual neural network utilizes a domain learner and balance learner to effectively balance the information of the minority class and learn the generalization knowledge from the imbalanced defect dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which has also been applied to real-world production equipment successfully.

The servicing of crane systems has been a major problem in the crane business value chain. The crane industry has been exploring well-defined solutions to solve problems on the customer's site. The service-oriented concept, empowered by artificial intelligence (AI) technology, has shown advantages in addressing issues in manufacturing. In this study, the authors propose a novel crane business model for the crane industry: a service-oriented autonomous crane system, which integrates advanced management concepts and AI-powered technology into the traditional industry-crane system. With the help of the novel business model, the crane industry and customers/users can benefit from an improvement in crane performance, and the model also offers further potential to promote problem-solving in the crane industry on the customer's site. From the perspective of knowledge development, this study gives a clear description of an intelligent service-oriented crane system. Crane stakeholders can develop their own customized autonomous crane systems based on the novel model with its technical structure. From the perspective of strengthening the crane business, the proposed model provides the foundation for developing smart solutions for the crane industry according to the specific requirements. From the perspective of scenarios applied to large construction machinery, the case study in this article provides a valuable reference for augmenting the servicing of large scale construction machinery.

The quality of the dataset is critical to the performance of neural networks for error prediction in 3-D printing. In order to enlarge the dataset, we propose a customized two-stage framework, cascaded cross-modality generative adversarial networks (CCMGANs), for generating dental crown meshes in an unsupervised manner. At the first stage, a displacement map-guided generative adversarial network (GAN) is used to generate coarse meshes with diverse shapes. At the second stage, fine-grained details are added to the coarse meshes using an image-based GAN. Unlike previous work that integrates a differentiable renderer into the mesh deformation process directly, we adopt a two-step strategy. First, we use a depth image refinement module to achieve the domain transformation from the rendered depth images of the generated meshes to those of the real ones. Then, we propose a mesh refinement module to optimize the coarse meshes in an image-supervised manner. To alleviate the self-intersection problem, we propose a loss to penalize the distances of point pairs in self-intersection regions. Experimental results show that our method is able to generate highly realistic meshes and outperforms the state-of-the-art point cloud generation method TreeGCN in terms of the metrics FDD, MMD-CD, MMD-EMD, and COV-EMD. Furthermore, we utilize the generated data to augment the original dataset, and demonstrate that the generated data can effectively improve the accuracy of the error prediction task in 3-D printing.

With the exacerbation of bridge aging issues, the demand for efficient and cost-effective bridge inspection solutions becomes increasingly urgent. Currently, most methods for surface damage detection on bridges employ single-modal, image-based object detection models. Despite their overall effectiveness on specific datasets, such methods frequently encounter error detection issues during actual inspection processes. This study proposes a multimodal (image and text) model for surface damage detection in bridge structures by combining the CLIP model with the YOLOv8 model. By conducting tests on the composite concrete bridge of the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge, Qingdao, the effectiveness of bridge detection using drones is validated, and the common issue of false positive detections in traditional object detection models is successfully addressed.

The intelligent manufacturing is a complex engineering system, and the cyber–physical systems (CPSs) and the industrial Internet are the preliminary infrastructures. When cyber–physical–social systems (CPSSs) are formed by extending CPS into the social aspect, Societies 5.0 era is coming. In the Societies 5.0 era, social manufacturing (SM) is an innovative manufacturing solution for intelligent manufacturing. In this article, a survey on SM is introduced. It includes the definition and theory of SM, and comparison between SM and other manufacturing paradigms. Moreover, the key supporting technologies are presented, which can be used to realize SM, such as blockchain, 3-D printing, and big data. Then, the applications of SM to industries are illustrated. The SM has broad application prospects in the high-end customized, distributed manufacturing, and other intelligent manufacturing. Finally, the challenges and future trends are discussed.

In the modern supply chain system, large-scale transportation tasks require the collaborative work of multiple vehicles to be completed on time. Over the past few decades, multi-vehicle route planning was mainly implemented by heuristic algorithms. However, these algorithms face the dilemma of long computation time. In recent years, some machine learning-based methods are also proposed for vehicle route planning, but the existing algorithms can hardly solve multi-vehicle time-sensitive problems. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning model, which optimizes the route length and the vehicle’s arrival time simultaneously. The model is based on the encoder-decoder framework. The encoder mines the relationship between the customer nodes in the problem, and the decoder generates the route of each vehicle iteratively. Specially, we design multiple route recorders to extract the route history information of vehicles and realize the communication between them. In the inferring phase, the model could immediately generate routes for all vehicles in a new instance. To further improve the performance of the model, we devise a multi-sampling strategy and obtain the balance boundary between computation time and performance improvement. In addition, we propose a simulation-based vehicle configuration method to select the optimal number of vehicles in real applications. For validation, we conduct a series of experiments on problems with different customer amounts and various vehicle numbers. The results show that the proposed model outperforms other typical algorithms in both performance and calculation time.

The number of vehicles is rapidly increasing. An effective control strategy for Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) is important. In this paper, we present a two-level control strategy that combines the Adaptive-Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy (A-ECMS) and the Adaptive Dynamic Programming (ADP). At the lower level, the A-ECMS is used to convert the consumed charge into Equivalent Fuel Consumption (EFC) for every sample moment, and a PI controller is used to adjust the values of the equivalent factor of the A-ECMS. At the upper level, the ADP is used to find the minimum of EFC corresponding to equivalent factor for every sample moment, and it maintains the State of Charge (SOC) of battery to charge and discharge smoothly in a high-efficiency field for the HEV. As by the ADP, we look into the future and then we can have a better estimate for the equivalent factor than the ordinary A-ECMS. In this way, we can save energy as well as calculate instantaneous parameters for the control strategy. Compared with a typical rule-based control strategy, the proposed control method saves EFC up to 10.3% and the stability of the SOC is increased by more than 60%, tested on benchmarks.

3D face reconstruction from a single 2D facial image is a challenging and concerned problem. Recent methods based on CNN typically aim to learn parameters of 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) from 2D images to render face alignment and 3D face reconstruction. Most algorithms are designed for faces with small, medium yaw angles, which is extremely challenging to align faces in large poses. At the same time, they are not efficient usually. The main challenge is that it takes time to determine the parameters accurately. In order to address this challenge with the goal of improving performance, this paper proposes a novel and efficient end-to-end framework. We design an efficient and lightweight network model combined with Depthwise Separable Convolution and Muti-scale Representation, Lightweight Attention Mechanism, named Mobile-FRNet. Simultaneously, different loss functions are used to constrain and optimize 3DMM parameters and 3D vertices during training to improve the performance of the network. Meanwhile, extensive experiments on the challenging datasets show that our method significantly improves the accuracy of face alignment and 3D face reconstruction. Model parameters and complexity of our method are also improved greatly.

The choice of model orientation is a very important issue in Additive Manufacturing (AM). In this paper, the model orientation problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem, aiming at minimizing the building time, the surface quality, and the supporting area. Then we convert the problem into a single-objective optimization in the linear-weighted way. After that, the Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to solve the optimization problem and the process of GA is parallelized and implemented on GPU. Experimental results show that when dealing with complex models in AM, compared with CPU only implementation, the GPU based GA can speed up the process by about 50 times, which helps to significantly reduce the optimization time and ensure the quality of solutions. The GPU based parallel methods we proposed can help to reduce the execution time and improve the efficiency greatly, making the processes more efficient.

As a typical cyber-physical system, 3D printing has developed very fast in recent years. There is a strong demand for mass customization, such as printing dental crowns. However, the accuracy of the 3D printed objects is low compared with traditional methods. The main reason is that the model to be printed is arbitrary and usually the quantity is small. The deformation is affected by the shape of the object and there is a lack of a universal method for the error compensation. It is neither easy nor economical to perform the compensation manually. In this paper, we present a framework for the automatic error compensation. We obtain the shape by technologies such as 3D scanning. And we use the "3D deep learning" method to train a deep neural network. For a specific task, such as dental crown printing, the network can learn the function of deformation when a large amount of data is used for training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of the deep neural network to the error compensation in 3D printing. And we propose the "inverse function network" to compensate for the error. We use four types of deformations of the dental crowns to verify the performance of the neural network: 1) translation; 2) scaling up; 3) scaling down; and 4) rotation. The convolutional AutoEncoder structure is employed for the end-to-end learning. The experiments show that the network can predict and compensate for the error well. By introducing the new method, we can improve the accuracy with little need for increasing the hardware cost.

As computing technologies develop, there is a trend in traffic simulation research in which the focus is moving from macro- and meso-simulation to micro-simulation since micro-simulation can provide more detailed quantitative results. Moreover, the success of the Artificial societies-Computational experiments-Parallel execution (ACP) approach indicates that integrating other metropolitan systems such as logistic, infrastructure, legal and regulatory, and weather and environmental systems to build an Artificial Transportation System (ATS) can be helpful in solving Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) problems. However, the computational burden is very heavy as there are many agents interacting in parallel in the ATS. Therefore, a parallel computing tool is desirable. We think that we can employ a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), which has been applied in many areas. In this paper, we use a GPU-adapted Parallel Genetic Algorithm (PGA) to solve the problem of generating daily activity plans for individual and household agents in the ATS, which is important as the activity plans determine the traffic demand in the ATS. Previous research has shown that GA is effective but that the computational burden is heavy. We extend the work to GPU and test our method on an NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU for two scenarios of generating plans for 1000 individual agents and 1000 three-person household agents. Speedup factors of 23 and 32 are obtained compared with implementations on a mainstream CPU.