DEVELOPMENT OF AUGMENTED REALITY SYSTEM FOR ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is becoming increasingly prevalent in diverse industries due to its ability to manufacture intricate and unique components at lower production costs. Despite its advantages in design flexibility and waste reduction, AM presents new challenges in real-time visibility, control mechanisms, and user interfaces. While existing web interfaces like OctoPrint offer partial solutions for monitoring the 3D printing process, Augmented Reality (AR) interfaces hold promise in enhancing real-time control and monitoring by overlaying computer-generated information onto the physical manufacturing environment. However, research on utilizing AR for remote collaboration and control of AM machines remains limited. This paper addresses this gap by proposing designing and developing an application that integrates an AR interface with a Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) printer, enabling remote monitoring and control using Microsoft's AR headset, HoloLens2. The proposed system incorporates the usage of open-source projects such as OctoPrint for retrieving data from 3D printer, Printerface for establishing communication between 3D printer and desktop server, Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) for the development of AR interface, and enterprise Photon Unity Networking 2 (PUN2) to establish the connection and achieve real-time communication with minimum latency close to 937 milliseconds. The measured time for data transmission between Octoprint and Unity Desktop Server is 0.01569 milliseconds and 936 milliseconds between Unity Desktop Server and AR client.