PRINCE GEORGE — The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, has awarded a $250,000 cooperative agreement to the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing, CCAM. The three-year project, entitled “Intelligent Flexible Manufacturing Cell,” will provide a testbed for accelerating and transitioning emerging digital manufacturing technology from the laboratory to the factory floor.
Industry 4.0 is pushing manufacturing to become more distributed, intelligent, and with autonomy at the cell level. Driven by these advances and motivations, manufacturing is becoming more digitally integrated than ever, enabling new insight into production processes via data directly captured from PLCs, sensors, and signals at the process and machine level. These advances allow flexible manufacturing, a process which can be modified to meet variable physical and digital demands.
The awarded NIST proposal develops and builds such a distributed manufacturing cell for the purpose of developing, integrating, and demonstrating the next generation of digital technology fueling the promise of Industry 4.0.
“The cyber-physical testbed will enable industry partners, standards organizations, and government partners to develop, test, and demonstrate new technologies, prove functional concepts, and test use cases that relate to flexible and distributed manufacturing processes,” said CCAM Intelligent Factory Research Manager, Dr. Tim Bakker.
“As a leader in our industry, Newport News Shipbuilding is interested in collaboration opportunities that may advance Industry,” said Newport News Shipbuilding Engineering Manager and CCAM Industrial Operations Board Chair, Dr. John W. Ralls. “We look forward to collaborating with CCAM, NIST, and other industrial partners as an outcome of this CCAM program.”
“These solutions generate real value to our growing consortium of industry and academic members,” said William T. Powers, CCAM president and CEO. “In addition to NIST, I would like to thank Newport News Shipbuilding, Hurco, Amsted Rail and Simplimatic Automation for their vision and support of this program.”
“As a CCAM member, CCAM supports our corporate research and development objectives in advanced manufacturing through vital collaborative, translational research and demonstration projects,” said Amsted Rail’s Digital Factory Manager, Scott J. Pinar.
Hurco Companies Inc. will provide a VM10i machining center that supports digital communication using the MT Connect machine monitoring protocol. “Hurco products and its engineering staff have extensive experience with interconnected machines using the MTConnect protocol and are uniquely qualified to support the objectives of this project,” said Cory Miller, Hurco North America’s General Manager.
By Contributed ReportThe Progress-Index