HP Executive Ramon Pastor Explains How Edge Computing & AI Enhance 3D Printer Security & Performance

Ramon Pastor shared with IoT Times his vision of advanced manufacturing, and how HP 3D printers are now able to use new materials, including metal, and can print electronics embedded in printed parts.

Industry 4.0 is finally taking off in Europe, and advances in technologies such as Industrial IoT, Edge Computing, and Artificial Intelligence are beginning to have an impact on manufacturing.

Last week, the Barcelona International Convention Centre hosted the fourth Advanced Factories conference and expo, packed with exhibitors such as ABB, Amada, Accenture, Bodor, HP, Igus, Infaimón, Rexroth Bosch, Schunk, TCI, Tecnalia, T·Systems, Trumpf, and Universal Robots.

During the conference Ramón Pastor, Vice President and General Manager, 3D Printing, HP, gave one of the keynotes taking about the state of the industry, the advantages of on-demand manufacturing, and the new technologies that HP is bringing to the market.

Pastor leads a team of people from more than 60 countries in Sant Cugat, just outside Barcelona. The site currently hosts 12 different businesses, including the R&D, Marketing and Operations of both HP 3D and Large Format Printing, plus the European Headquarters of the Graphics Business.

We sat down with Pastor after his presentation. He shared with IoT Times his vision of the future in manufacturing, and how technologies such as 3D printing, paired with edge computing and AI, are fueling the transformation of the industry.

Ramon Pastor at Advanced Factories 2019

IoT Times: Good morning Ramón, I was at your presentation this morning, and you mentioned technologies like edge computing and AI. How are those technologies affecting 3D printing and advanced manufacturing?

Ramón Pastor: I think in the case of edge computing, it helps with a number of cases. The one that we think is more relevant for us is security. All our machines are connected. This is key in order to learn about the process and provide a better customer experience by predictive maintenance, and give better support. There are a lot of growing concerns about connectivity on the cloud, and although we offer a very, very secure connection, encrypted data, point to point security, you name it, this is still an issue.

And edge computing will help us a lot on this end, where you keep most of the data within the firewall of the enterprise and then what is sent to the cloud and our servers is a much lower subset, one that cannot be hacked, and the amount of data that comes out of it is meaningless for cyber attacks. So that’s one for instance on why edge computing has an impact, I think a very positive impact for us.

Other things are artificial intelligence, or in this case, machine learning. We are actively using machine learning today to analyze the data that we get from the operation of our printers to improve our own process. So it’s actually, the way that today we improve the process, some part of this is deterministic. We understand the process, and we use engineering judgement or design the next generation. Some of it comes from machine learning, which are things that we know that help the process. Working with machine learning is absolutely needed. You cannot only rely on machine learning because maybe it takes you into places that are not the place that you want to be, but the right combination of machine learning and edge computing can help to provide a better service and optimize our offerings.

IoT Times:  What about printed electronics? You talked about that last year. You didn’t mention it on this year presentation. Has it been any advances in this field?

Ramón Pastor: There are advances in the lab not ready for publication. It’s a product that we have publicly announced and not only 2D electronics. The novelty here is printing 3D electronics embedded in objects. Therefore, for almost zero-marginal incremental cost, you can build in sensors. Every object can have power lines, signal lines, sensors, embedded like this.

IoT Times: What type of sensors?

Ramón Pastor:   Most types of sensors. What we cannot do within the same 3D printing technology is going to the nano level. So printing microprocessors, this is far out. Going to the micro level, however, is perfectly viable, and we have demonstrated that we can do it.

IoT Times: What about sustainability? this is one of the main topics today in the industry, in every industry. How do you think 3D printing is going to help sustainability, especially by reducing the use of fossil fuels?

Ramón Pastor: In many ways. In today’s industrial paradigm, what you do is you manufacture in areas of the world with low wages, and then, you need to transport all these products to where the demand is, usually on the other side of the world.

With 3D printing, and in general, Industry 4.0, what it does is puts the basis of transformation of how today we understand manufacturing, logistics, and distribution. The fact that Industry 4.0 economically enables distributed manufacturing means that you can change the way that you build and distribute products.

There are some estimations that up to half of the fuel, fossil fuel, in this case, consumed in the world is used to transport products from where they’re produced to where they’re consumed. In this sense, the combination of Industry 4.0, digital manufacturing, and 3D printing enables us to change this paradigm and go to distributed manufacturing, which is basically, you manufacture what you need at the moment that you need next to where the demand is. This way you can save a lot in logistics costs, and one of the big things is matching the demand with the offer. So the fact of not only reducing the fuel that is in transport but also a much better matching between what you produce and what you consume could save a lot of energy.

Besides this, we are able to work with technologies that manufacture 100% recyclable products. The excess of plastic that you use to create a product can be recycled for the next build.

Moreover, we can make products that have better performance in terms of weight, that are more efficient, which at the end, for sectors like automotive, or electric cars, is critical. The electric car industry is one of the sectors that are adopting 3D printing faster than others because weight is critical for autonomy. So with the same fuel, you can travel longer distances. All these things together, we think that it will have a significant impact. We know that one-third of global energy is used by traditional manufacturing. Just by using 3D printing we can provide savings between 5 to 25 percent of this energy, depending on the sector, but you can have a significant impact.

Stay tuned for part 2 of our interview Ramon Pastor.