Exploring the integration of extended reality for design and process education in additive manufacturing powered digital threads
Open Access
- Author:
- Mathur, Jayant
- Graduate Program:
- Engineering Design
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- June 18, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Scarlett Miller, Program Head/Chair
Nicholas Alexander Meisel, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Timothy W. Simpson, Committee Member
Scarlett Rae Miller, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Additive manufacturing
Extended reality
Augmented reality
Virtual reality
Education
Cognitive load
Knowledge gain
Fiducial markers
Inspection
Computer-aided instruction - Abstract:
- Additive manufacturing (AM) is an emerging technology that is disrupting how we design and manufacture products. It is therefore becoming crucial that designers and engineers are capable of analyzing, designing, and fabricating parts that leverage the opportunistic capabilities of AM, while being well aware of the restrictive elements for the range of AM processes. While there is a high demand for a skilled AM workforce, there are limited tools and resources in place to improve the design and process intuition needed to adequately prepare designers and engineers for product development. The goal for this presented work was to develop, test, and evaluate tools powered by extended reality (XR) that can be used to improve the inspection of additively manufactured parts and provide designers with the platforms to gain design- and process-centric AM knowledge through accessible educational mediums. This work first evaluated how AM can be integrated with XR and aimed to understand how AM parts need to be developed for a part inspection process that leverages augmented reality (AR) as a visualization tool. Specifically, how can marker-based AR be integrated into manufacturing by designing additively manufactured fiducial markers onto the manufactured parts, and what design and process considerations need to be considered when implementing AR-based inspection. The goal of this research was to investigate the design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) considerations needed to integrate AR as a rapid inspection tool to assist designers in developing an intuition for DfAM. This work then switched perspectives to evaluate how extended reality can be applied to support AM. Studies were conducted to understand how virtual mediums can be leveraged to educated designers about process-centric AM concepts. Specifically, how can non-immersive computer-aided instruction (CAI) and immersive virtual reality (VR) instruction of two AM processes of different functional complexity affect the knowledge gain and cognitive load experienced by designers. The goal for this research was to evaluate virtual mediums of education as alternatives to in-person instruction for AM processes like powder bed fusion that are typically inaccessible for hands-on learning. This presented work elaborates on the details of these research efforts and highlights their key findings.