Markforged
Markforged Blacksmith AI
It started with a conversation between co-founder and co-founder, CEO and CTO, when the first machines of a 3D printing OEM were being built. Such were the ambitions of Markforged, even back in 2013, quality control was going to be a big deal.
Greg Mark, the CEO in this exchange, had his idea, and David Benhaim, the CTO, had his. Mark went first. He supposed a process where the measurement would be carried out manually, the reading of that measurement would be carried out manually, and the recording of that measurement would be carried out manually.
“He started laughing at me. He was like, ‘that’s your idea of quality control?’,” Mark recalls. “He’s like, ‘this sensor will do that for you automatically for every part that comes out of here. I’m going to wrap a feedback loop around this thing, throw some AI at it, and it will be done.’ And I was like, ‘that’s a much better idea. Much, much better.’ It’s just taken us this long to do it because you can’t just go buy a piece of AI software and shove some training set to it and it just works. It takes a lot of configuration.”
At RAPID + TCT, in the temperamental climate of Detroit in the spring time, Markforged unveiled what ‘it’ was, and is, and will be. Blacksmith is a software platform, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), which boasts a continuous feedback loop so what comes out of the printer is learnt from for future jobs. It is first being introduced on Markforged’s Metal X platform, before extending across to its polymer portfolio, and then, “This is going across every part of manufacturing. But it’s going to start in additive.”
Underneath a looming Faro ScanArm is a 12 mm wrench, which has been designed in CAD, sent to a Markforged printer, come out the other end, and now it rests on a flat, also 3D printed, fixture. Mark takes hold of the ScanArm, clicks the buttons into three corners of the fixture for calibration, and sets about live scanning the wrench. On the monitor above, the wrench is being displayed in one colour, the fixture in another. Blacksmith knows what it’s looking for because the geometry has passed through the printer. Everything else is cut away.
"The goal of the company was to change manufacturing."
Mark then grabs another wrench, which, to the naked eye, or at least our imperfect eyesight, looks like the one we’ve just inspected. There’s a slight difference, not that either of us could tell, but Blacksmith could.
“What we’ll end up saying is, ‘hey, this part is out of spec, you can reprint it, it will automatically adjust the parameters of the machine and the sintering cycle and bring it into spec,” Mark explains. “Every time you print this wrench and you inspect it, it learns more about printing, about sintering, about shrinking, about sliding on the plate, about deprivation of metal, because it’s running through an AI.
“And when you print things, by the way, AI doesn’t know that you’re printing a wrench, it knows that you have this surface contact with the bed. We’ve printed bicycle gears and it makes our turbines print better because AI understands there’s this chunk of material in this free space, this amount of material touching the bed, it sees the world differently from us, so it can pattern match against things that, to humans, we can’t see the similarity. It can see the similarity.”
It’s capabilities like this that convince Markforged that when the company gets this technology out into the market and across the world – Blacksmith is still currently in pilot, in the hands of a select few customers, until later this year – it will surpass Mark’s ability to redesign parts after inspection. When it is rolled out globally to its customer base, who currently run thousands of machines collectively, Blacksmith won’t be learning at the rate of each individual user, but at the rate of all of them combined. Markforged expects it not only to enhance the repeatability of parts, getting things right first time, but the scaling of implementing additive manufacturing across businesses.
“Take your pick. Fortune 100, military, it doesn’t matter. When they buy printers and start using them, they have some expert in additive, but when they want to roll it out further, they’re limited by ‘I don’t have the people who know how to use it’,” Mark says. “You print a wrench and get the wrong wrench; they don’t know how to fix it. We automate that. It’s like taking a bad-ass application engineer, putting them in the cloud so they’re automatically moving the handles around, and it’s super easy-to-use.”
It’s also accessible. Users of machines that are multiple years old can license the software, integrate it with their machine(s), and continue printing parts, the increase in accuracy should follow in time. It can also be paired with a more mobile scanning system like the Faro ScanArm, which many of Markforged’s customers already have, or if you’re operating in an industry like the aerospace market and need even higher accuracy, you can link it up to a CMM machine.
Markforged team with metal x
The Markforged team with the Metal X 3D printer.
While Blacksmith was in development these last couple of years, Markforged expanded its portfolio, bringing to market the Metal X and filling out its Industrial Series with the X5 and X7 platforms. All of these machines boasted in-process inspection capabilities thanks to a laser micrometer built into the print head which provides 1-micron accuracy in the Z axis. But Markforged had always planned a move beyond.
“The goal of the company was to change manufacturing,” Mark says, “and the platform, whether you’re printing titanium, stainless steel, carbon fibre, fibre-less, etc, [the laser micrometer in the print head] is great for in-process inspection, but on the stainless steel side you need to inspect after the furnace. So, having a laser in the printer isn’t enough, you need to have a post-process, which is what people are doing now. That’s why we did the integration with Faro, but this is why we connect all the printers, this is why we did the in-process inspection in 2016, this is the direction we’ve been planning to go.”
Mark began proceedings at RAPID + TCT setting the scene of hundreds of years of manufacturing, coming through a number of industrial revolutions with machinery not knowing what they were outputting. It had a knock-on effect on uptime, how many machines an operator can run, and gave the manufacturer higher rates of scrap. This is what Markforged is wanting to change.
As he snaps into action and demoes Blacksmith for what must be the 100th time this week, Mark begins to analogise. He likens it to a company that helped kickstart the second industrial revolution in the state of Michigan some 106 years earlier and the innovation in that vertical market in more recent times. Mark is stepping on the gas, checking his blind spots, turning the steering wheel, squeezing the brakes, and Benhaim is laughing at him.
“You have Henry Ford and the car, the steering wheel, the pedals. Fast forward 120 years later, my car has got the same steering wheels and the pedals, and I still have to drive it,” Mark bemoans. “My co-founder has this beautiful Tesla P100D, it’s so awesome, and you hit the button and it sees the cars around him, it spins the pedals, it does the whole thing, and it drives. And every six months it gets better at driving, and in a handful of years he’s not going to have to touch the wheel at all. We’re doing that for factories.”
