SwRI Presents at America Makes TRX

Southwest Research Institute had the pleasure of hosting the America Makes TRX conference here in San Antonio Texas for two days in March to discuss the latest up and comings of additive manufacturing and its technologies. ROS Industrial made a cameo in the lineup on Thursday the 21st where I gave my presentation, Open Source Developments Impacting the Industrial Automation Space & Their Relevance to Additive Processing. The talk focused on the synergies between additive manufacturing and ROS.

I present on the synergies between ROS and additive Manufacturing

Boasting over 100 attendees, TRX was the first America Makes held at the Institute and – for many – their first introduction to ROS and the robotic capabilities available to the additive manufacturing community. Additive manufacturing focuses primarily on the metallurgical problems associated with lamentation and homogenous particulate bonding with significant research focus on the optimization of material properties and subsequent process ills such as wavy depositions or stress localizations and predictions from discrete inspections. The introduction or ROS capabilities surrounding laser inspections and blending were of strong interest to several groups and attendees.

Follow up tours were held of the Southwest Research Institute labs that are leveraged for ROS-Industrial application development. Here follow up conversations, and tangible examples relative to the additive process through the complete value stream were discussed. This included more effective ways to do post-processing, alternate applications of on the fly material deposition, and material removal, as well as the ability to resolve build errors that could occur during large format printing operations.

Ben Greenberg gives a demo of SwRI’s Visual Programming IR&D.

Special thanks to Carl Popelar and Division 18 for his efforts in organizing the America Makes Technology Exchange and all supporting SwRI staff.