3YOURMIND receives €1.3 million to improve machine learning for Additive Manufacturing
July 19, 2019
The investment bank of Berlin has awarded AM workflow software developer 3YOURMIND, Berlin, Germany, with €1.3 million in Pro FIT funding, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). This funding will reportedly be used to extend machine learning applications throughout its software suite, designed to optimise the industrial Additive Manufacturing value chain.
3YOURMIND’s software helps identify AM-suitable parts from existing inventories. For companies and AM services who are already actively using Additive Manufacturing technology, the software suite is designed to serve as their digital access point for accurate pricing, file management, automated order processing and transparent tracking of the production floor.
In addition to building out machine connectivity, 3YOURMIND will focus on interlinking its software suite with machine learning to improve depth of optimisation, lower processing costs and move Additive Manufacturing towards true automation. It will use the Pro FIT funding to add artificial neural networks (ANNs) into its software; an approach for programming challenges which have little or no explicit, systematic knowledge available.
As a relatively young industry, Additive Manufacturing is still developing process documentation and best practice techniques for industrial-scale production. This is especially true of serial AM. Stephan Kühr, CEO of 3YOURMIND, explained, “Our software makes it simple and cost effective for companies to enter and scale Additive Manufacturing. By adding more machine learning to our software, we will multiply the effectiveness of AM programme.”
“AM is already a data-driven production method and we are the leading company to focus on connecting and optimising workflows using that data” he continued. “3YOURMIND is developing the software infrastructure for a level of automation we call agile manufacturing; the ability to quickly and accurately adapt production to customer needs and company resources.“
Software is widely thought to be the key enabler for the industrialisation of AM, accelerating the rate of adoption by multiplying the effectiveness of individual design engineers, production engineers and division managers. The 3YOURMIND team will now analyse part information and platform usage from opt-in environments and evaluate non-sensitive data to identify and codify patterns.
Each development test will then be directly cycled into the software for further validation. The 3YOURMIND customer list, including AM companies in Europe and the USA, will be used to ‘train’ the software.
The Pro FIT Berlin research project ‘Smart 3D-printing’ is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and from the Research, Innovation and Technology Promotion Program (Pro FIT) of the Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB). It began in October 2018 and will continue over two years including the programming development work to integrate machine learning directly into the 3YOURMIND software suite.
