We’re all familiar with photos of Ford’s production lines in 1920. Would we recognize them today? As part of the broader Industry 4.0 trend, systems in many factories have modernized considerably in recent years. This digitization of the manufacturing sector aims to apply emerging technologies — such as cloud computing, smart automation, IoT devices, digital inventories, and data analytics — to use data to help engineers make better decisions, improve factory processes, and ultimately require less human oversight.
At the center of the factory’s shift towards digital is additive manufacturing, which enables the core suite of Industry 4.0 technologies to be directly applied to the process of fabrication itself. 3D printers have come a long way from their humble beginnings as rapid prototyping machines and gimmick factories for novelty items. They’ve upleveled not just into machines that fabricate high-performance parts for factories to airplanes, but also into data collection hubs that gather massive quantities of information about how different parts are built during the fabrication process.
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