Paul Brackman loads 3D-printed metal samples into a tower for examination using an X-ray CT scan in DOE's Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at ORNL.

With the rapid development of powder-based additive manufacturing, depowdering, a process of removing unfused powder that covers 3D-printed parts, has become a major bottleneck to further improve its productiveness. Traditional manual depowdering is extremely time-consuming and costly, and some prior automated systems either require pre-depowdering or lack adaptability to different 3D-printed parts. To solve these problems, we introduce a robotic system that automatically removes unfused powder from the surface of 3D-printed parts. The key component is a visual perception system, which consists of a pose-tracking module that tracks the 6D pose of powder-occluded parts in real-time, and a progress estimation module that estimates the depowdering completion percentage. The tracking module can be run efficiently on a laptop CPU at up to 60 FPS. Experiments show that our depowdering system can remove unfused powder from the surface of various 3D-printed parts without causing any damage. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first vision-based robotic depowdering systems that adapt to parts with various shapes without the need for pre-depowdering.

What if you could ride your own giant LEGO electric skateboard, make a synthesizer that you can play with a barcode reader, or build a strong robot dog based on the Boston Dynamics dog robot? Today sees the start of a new series of videos that focuses on James Bruton's open source robot projects. James Bruton is a former toy designer, current YouTube maker and general robotics, electrical and mechanical engineer. He has a reputation for building robot dogs and building Iron Man inspired cosplays. He uses 3D printing, CNC and sometimes welding to build all sorts of robotics related creations.

It's been a tough year or so for Air Force maintainers. High-profile aircraft failures plagued the service recently, including emergency landings of C-5 cargo aircraft, the grounding of the B-1 bomber fleet, and the loss of a C-130 propeller in mid-flight. The immediate causes of these accidents vary, the but root cause is the same: age. The average age of an Air Force aircraft is 28 years, and many planes are significantly older. Crews fly still fly the B-52 bomber, after all, with its average age of 56.