AMRC NEWS
Factory 2050
filling up with equipment and projects Factory 2050, the AMRC’s £43 million reconfigurable, digital factory for collaborative research, is beginning to fill up with cutting edge research projects. The development on Sheffield Business Park, close to the AMRC’s Advanced Manufacturing Park headquarters, is home to the AMRC’s Integrated Manufacturing Group, whose current complement of 40 people is continuing to grow. IMG’s research focuses on robotics and automation, integrated large volume metrology, digitally assisted assembly and manufacturing informatics. Using those technologies, it is developing ways for industry to meet rising demand for mass customisation and high variation down to a batch size of one, if required, and ‘intelligent’ machines and processes that can monitor and optimise their operations. IMG is investigating ways of creating new production line configurations,
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tailored to specific products and sectors by allowing machines to be moved easily around the factory floor.
the right information to the right person at the right time, in the right format and using the device that suits them best.
Rapid reconfiguration is facilitated by routing single and three phase power, data, air and other services through ducts that go around the circumference and hub of Factory 2050’s glass-walled rotunda and are also along spokes between the centre and circumference.
The group is also leading the AMRC’s work on ‘Internet of Things’ technologies that are driving Industry 4.0 by allowing different devices and human operators to communicate, including developing the best ways of handling and making sense of ‘Big Data’ – the masses of data generated by Internet enabled equipment and products.
Factory 2050 also incorporates wireless technologies that include industrial Wifi, low power Bluetooth and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). IMG’s work spans techniques for shortening lead times and rapidly ramping production up and down, the development of intelligent work benches and instruction systems using virtual and augmented reality to deliver
Current projects include improving the accuracy of robots by incorporating additional encoders in joints and end effectors, so that they can carry out machining operations and developing versatile, adaptive fixturing for large scale aerospace structures.
AMRC Quarterly Journal Q2 2016