MIT Students Innovate 3D Printing With A Restart Function

One of the most annoying things that has been haunting 3D printing for years is that far from every print is pristine or precise. The number of errors that can be found in each finished object of course varies, but they are always present and sometimes it takes a few prints in order to get the desired result. 3D printers are slowly becoming more precise and exact, but the process still lacks the accuracy that most tinkerers request and require.

A group of MIT students recently announced that they might have solved this problem using laser scanning. Their approach is unlike any other and might push 3D printing to the level appropriate to the one requested by most users. This innovation will allow you to “restart” your print without wasting material on an entirely new object. Instead, the incorporated laser scanner will help record the errors and later on patch them all up. Let’s take a closer look at what this laser scanner does and why this could be huge for the 3D printing industry.

Incorporated into this new innovative 3D printer is a laser scanner that scans each layer as it is printed. The layer is recorded as a point cloud before the 3D printer proceeds to print the next layer. During the course of the printing, the recorded point cloud is compared to the 3D object model. Should the recorded point cloud model deviate from the original 3D model itself then the scanner goes back and “fixes” the issues ensuring the object is corresponding with the original 3D model.

Not only will this help save a lot of 3D printing material, but it will also heavily increase the speed of 3D printing as well as increase the quality of the objects themselves. Once optimized, this new quality check feature could push 3D printing to new heights and ultimately take 3D printing to the next level.

This noble group of MIT students know this is an important breakthrough and therefore will make this feature open source to speed up the implementation of it into all of the 3D printers that are now available on the market. In the near future, you will never again have to waste material, time or your sanity on trying to produce the perfect 3D printed object. All you will have to do is to make sure your model is correct and then hit that “Start Printing” button and wait. No doubt could this new feature have a huge impact on the 3D printing industry as a whole.