ILLUMINATION WORKS, LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: A224-001

Description

The Army seeks an artificial intelligence (AI) enabled decision support tool for additive manufacturing (AM) engineers to speed the identification of parts for AM. Presently, Army AM engineers spend innumerable hours manually searching Army’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems to review and analyze technical and logistics data to determine part printability, which is an inefficient and costly endeavor. Illumination Works (ILW) offers Army our Linnea Part Printability Recommendation System, which will integrate seamlessly with Army PLM systems to automatically process technical and logistics data, identify relevant data features, apply AI/machine learning (ML) algorithms, and predict the suitability of parts for AM printability. By Phase I end, the feasibility of an automated pipeline for CAD model and metadata preprocessing, feature engineering, and ML classification to predict part suitability for AM printing will be proven. Through Phase I experiments, ILW will identify the best AI/ML model that provide 90%+ accuracy in its AM part candidacy prediction, based on input part complexity and other key features. ILW’s Linnea is an enabling technology for the Army that will greatly improve the efficiency of Army’s AM selection process and save AM engineer’s time by automating much of the Army AM part candidacy analysis pipeline.