ARM Institute Selects Eight New Technology Projects
The ARM (Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing) Institute has announced eight new robotics projects. These projects address widespread manufacturing needs in the United States and, in particular, relate to key Department of Defense modernization priorities focused on production.
The selected projects target the challenges that the Department of Defense and the commercial community consider most urgent and important, and that the ARM Institute ecosystem, which includes more than 330 member organizations, can help solve.
The projects align with the ARM Institute's mission to strengthen US manufacturing and expand worker capabilities. The ARM Institute plans to allocate about $4 million to fund the projects, and the total contribution to the eight projects will be about $8 million.
Helping Program Robots with Artificial Intelligence
Lead: University of Memphis
Partners: READY Robotics, FedEx, DeepHow
Technologies now exist that can significantly reduce the knowledge required to program and install a robot, using no-code methods that make robot programming accessible to those working on the factory floor. However, there is still a limited knowledge of process automation, which can become a bottleneck or undermine successful robotic deployment.
This project aims to create an assistance system that can compensate for a lack of experience by providing suggestions and corrections while programming robot tasks. The system will use artificial intelligence and machine learning methods to learn a model of a manufacturing task from previously programmed tasks and use this corpus to assist the user. This will allow a novice programmer to approach expert-level programming.
Visual-Tactile Robotic Surface Inspection
Management: Siemens
Partners: GelSight Inc., Carnegie Mellon University, ATI Specialty Alloys and Components, Boeing
This project will develop a robotic visual and tactile inspection system that automates the checking of surface defects in spacecraft components and commercial aircraft fuselages.
Aircraft maintenance processes that incorporate these robotic technology improvements, especially technologies that improve inspection quality and replace manual operations, can significantly increase the reliability, maintainability and readiness of aviation assets and ultimately reduce equipment lifecycle costs.
The use of artificial intelligence and robotics will allow the system to standardize and study inspection processes for many components across various industries, which will also benefit a wide range of ARM Institute members.
Optimized Robot Motion Program for Tracking Complex Geometric Paths
Lead: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Partners: GE Research, Southwest Research Institute, Wason Technology
This project aims to autonomously create high-speed, high-precision curved tool paths for a robot on complex curved geometry using industrial robots with redundant degrees of freedom, in order to reduce or eliminate the manual tuning often required today.
The project will develop an optimization approach to decompose a given path into a sequence of robot motion primitives to achieve minimum cycle time with guaranteed tracking accuracy. Simulation-based data will be used to train machine learning tools to reduce optimization computation time.
Autonomous Robotic Metal Forming
Lead: Ohio State University
Partners: Yaskawa, CapSen Robotics
The project team will address the challenge of low-volume production of complex metal components in large quantities. Metal components are widely used in the commercial automotive sector, high-performance sports cars, heavy factory equipment, power systems, and military equipment based on air, ground and sea platforms.
When components need to be replaced, especially for legacy systems, quality, cost and lead time often cannot be balanced to reach an acceptable solution. The team will develop and deploy an artificial intelligence-enabled robotic system capable of flexibly producing many geometric component shapes on time and at minimal cost.
Uniform Robotic Grinding with In-Process Inspection
Management: GKN Aerospace
Partners: National Aerospace Research Institute, GrayMatter Robotics, University of Washington, EWI
Past ARM Institute projects on automated surface finishing included path planning, uniform processing and automatic inspection. The team will combine the results of these past projects to create an efficient grinding and polishing technology that will benefit many industries.
High-Precision Adaptive Machining for High-Temperature Materials
Lead: GE Research
Partners: GrayMatter Robotics, FANUC
The project team will focus on enabling high-precision adaptive machining of complex cooling contours in high-temperature materials by developing an open-architecture platform that integrates sensor data and automatically adjusts tool paths and process parameters to achieve an optimal solution for laser drilling.
Sensors will be used both to check the variability of incoming parts and in-process to track the progress of the machining operation. This project will reduce the scrap rate by improving process control and repeatability, and will create a structure that allows alternative tools and/or sensors to be easily replaced according to the target task.
Automated Pick, Place and Forming of Ceramic Matrix Composites
Management: Boeing
Partners: University of Southern California, 3M
To make defense and commercial high-temperature structures accessible, cost-effective means of manufacturing components from high-quality heat-resistant materials with higher performance are needed.
The project team plans to develop automated trajectory planning for forming contour-based fabric prepregs (composite semi-finished materials), automatic in-process checking of unconsolidated areas, and automatic generation of tool paths for rework, as well as self-correcting robotic recovery from failures in removing the prepreg backing.
Safe Robotic Handling of Energetic Materials
Lead: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Partners: Schlumberger, Interface Technologies, FANUC
The project team aims to develop fundamental technologies for robotic processing of energetic materials. Manufacturing with energetic materials imposes numerous process constraints, the foremost being limits on the mass of energetic material that may be present at any given time in a given space.
This project seeks to reduce this exposure by applying robotics to the energetic material replenishment operation. The project implementation will demonstrate safety systems, strategies and robot handling designs that are directly applicable to the production of shaped charges and, more broadly, to the manufacturing of other devices and products that use energetics.
