IMTS 2026: Automated Calibration Moves Precision Off the Critical Path in Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing has long carried a reputation problem on the production floor. Design freedom was never in doubt; dimensional accuracy and repeatability were. High precision was achievable, but historically it depended on expert users, manual calibration, and tightly controlled print conditions — a fragile foundation for anyone trying to run additive as a true production process.

At the IMTS 2026 Conference, a session scheduled for September 16 at 11:00 A.M. in Room W192-B (IMTS41) makes the case that this equation has fundamentally changed. The talk, focused on advances in automated calibration and feature-level correction, argues that precision is no longer the bottleneck in additive manufacturing.

From Skill-Dependent to Self-Correcting

The core shift is away from materials or machine hardware alone and toward digital calibration workflows. In this model, printers self-correct across the entire build area and selectively fine-tune critical features to nominal dimensions. The presentation highlights systematic correction of three specific error sources: optical distortion, intensity variation, and scaling error.

The result, per the session, is not only tighter tolerances but far greater consistency across machines, sites, and operators — the combination that turns additive manufacturing from a skill-dependent process into a repeatable, globally consistent manufacturing technology.

Production Data, Not Theory

The claims are not hypothetical. The presentation draws on real production data, using connectors as an example use-case, to show how feature-level correction performs under actual manufacturing conditions.

For manufacturing professionals evaluating additive technologies today, the session frames a meaningful inflection point. The real question is no longer whether additive can hold tolerance, but how controlled, software-driven calibration can enable additive manufacturing to meet the expectations of modern production environments — reliably, at scale, and with far less manual intervention than in the past.

The Presenter

Michael Muenchow, a manufacturing systems leader at Stratasys, will present. In his role as Product Support Manager at Stratasys, Muenchow supported the transition from expert-driven operation to more automated, software-controlled system behavior. His background includes work with engineering teams and customers addressing consistency, dimensional performance, and scale-up challenges in production use — experience aligned with the session's goal of helping advanced production technologies perform reliably in real-world environments.