The Industry 4.0 paradigm introduced several technologies in the industrial manufacturing landscape, highlighting the Cyber Physical Systems, Internet of Things and Visual Computing as some of the key enabling technologies. The fast paced evolution of the technology has to be reflected in the common ground between the machines and the operators. The introduction of advanced, flexible and adaptable Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) will empower the operators with information and custom tools to be more productive in a safer way. This work presents totally functional hardware and a novel software architecture to build flexible advanced HMI interfaces that will provide adaptable and useful information to the operator of the machines. Industrial protocols are used to receive real-time data. A USB camera can be plugged to enable the utilisation of Computer Vision algorithms. A touch display shows adaptable interfaces composed of (a) 3D interactive graphics, (b) texts and 2D images, (c) the camera feed and (d) user interface controls to enable the interaction with the operators. The results present three use cases: (a) an HMI customised for 3D printers, (b) real-time motor control from the HMI and (c) a digital twin of a robotic arm receiving real-time data from the actual robotic arm. This work present data regarding consumption of the hardware for each use case under different work-load.

This article presents and discusses the implementation of a volume rendering system for the Web, which articulates a large portion of the rendering task in the client machine -- By placing the rendering emphasis in the local client, our system takes advantage of its power, while at the same time eliminates processing from unreliable bottlenecks (e.g. network) -- The system developed articulates in efficient manner the capabilities of the recently released WebGL standard, which makes available the accelerated graphic pipeline (formerly unusable) -- The dependency on specially customized hardware is eliminated, and yet efficient rendering rates are achieved -- The Web increasingly competes against desktop applications in many scenarios, but the graphical demands of some of the applications (e.g. interactive scientific visualization by volume rendering), have impeded their successful settlement in Web scenarios -- Performance, scalability, accuracy, security are some of the many challenges that must be solved before visualWeb applications popularize -- In this publication we discuss both performance and scalability of the volume rendering by WebGL ray-casting in two different but challenging application domains: medical imaging and radar meteorolog

The generation of the printing paths is a decisive step in additive manufacturing (AM). There is a variety of patterns that offer different characteristics, but those that are strictly continuous become especially relevant in certain types of AM by extrusion, with materials like bioinks, carbon or clays, since they do not allow the retraction of the material and travelling movements result in the generation of artifacts. In this work, we present (1) a method that generates continuous paths to fill 2D polygons with a hybrid zig-zag and contour pattern with any direction and line separation, which extends an algorithm that decomposes the 2D area to be filled into convex areas, overcoming its limitations to generate less subpolygons in certain cases, (2) a method to join the subpolygon trajectories such that a continuous path that fills the whole polygon is obtained, and (3) a publicly available dataset containing (a) a set of 2D polygons that are relevant to test the performance of the algorithms and (b) the results of filling those polygons with our methodology. Results show that the developed methods produce satisfactory results for the polygons contained in the evaluation dataset, including a couple of demonstrations of real 3D prints with the generated trajectories. Further work is needed to extend the methodology to produce suitable solutions for polygons with curved holes.