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Abstract Skeletal fixation plates are essential components in craniomaxillofacial (CMF) reconstructive surgery to connect skeletal disunions. To ensure that these plates achieve geometric conformity to the CMF skeleton of individual patients, a pre-operative procedure involving manual plate bending is traditionally required. However, manual adjustment of the fixation plate can be time-consuming and is prone to geometric error due to the springback effect and human inspection limitations. This work represents a first step towards autonomous incremental plate bending for CMF reconstructive surgery through machine learning-enabled springback prediction and feedback bending control. Specifically, a Gaussian process is first investigated to complement the physics-based Gardiner equation to improve the accuracy of springback effect estimation, which is then incorporated into nonlinear model predictive controller to determine the optimal sequence of bending inputs to achieve geometric conformity. Evaluation using a simulated environment for bending confirms the effectiveness of the developed approach. 

Abstract This paper details the design and operation of a testbed to evaluate the concept of autonomous manufacturing to achieve a desired manufactured part performance specification. This testbed, the autonomous manufacturing system for phononic crystals (AMSPnC), is composed of additive manufacturing, material transport, ultrasonic testing, and cognition subsystems. Critically, the AMSPnC exhibits common manufacturing deficiencies such as process operating window limits, process uncertainty, and probabilistic failure. A case study illustrates the AMSPnC function using a standard supervised learning model trained by printing and testing an array of 48 unique designs that span the allowable design space. Using this model, three separate performance specifications are defined and an optimization algorithm is applied to autonomously select three corresponding design sets to achieve the specified performance. Validation manufacturing and testing confirms that two of the three optimal designs, as defined by an objective function, achieve the desired performance, with the third being outside the design window in which a distinct bandpass is achieved in phononic crystals (PnCs). Furthermore, across all samples, there is a marked difference between the observed bandpass characteristics and predictions from finite elements method computation, highlighting the importance of autonomous manufacturing for complex manufacturing objectives. 

Abstract Powder bed fusion (PBF) is an additive manufacturing (AM) process that builds parts in a layer-by-layer fashion out of a bed of metal powder via the selective melting action of a laser or electron beam heat source. Despite its transformational manufacturing capabilities, PBF is currently controlled in the open loop and there is significant demand to apply closed-loop process monitoring and control to the thermal management problem. This paper introduces a controls theoretic analysis of the controllability and observability of temperature states in PBF. The main contributions of the paper are proofs that certain configurations of PBF are classically controllable and observable, but that these configurations are not strongly structurally controllable and observable. These results are complemented by case studies, demonstrating the energy requirement of state estimation under various, industry relevant PBF configurations. These fundamental characterizations of controllability and observability provide a basis for realizing closed-loop PBF temperature estimation.