MIT and AeroAstro’s role
Decline in U.S. Manufacturing Employment (millions), 1990-2010 18000 17000 16000 15000 14000 13000 12000 11000 10000 2010
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Despite gains in the 1990s, there has been a precipitous decline in the U.S. manufacturing labor force, especially since the year 2000.
MIT and the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics are global leaders in aerospace innovation and manufacturing research and are committed to conceptualization, design, manufacturing, and operation of complex aerospace systems. Through our educational and research programs we strengthen the U.S. manufacturing base. Increasingly, we see sponsors and students who want new designs implemented in practice and want to be able to rapidly prototype and test new aerospace vehicles and operational approaches. Consider the following three examples.
First, we have been, and continue to be, a major contributor to the DARPA META program, which is a part of the Adaptive Vehicle Make portfolio. The goal of this program is to achieve a factor of five compression in the time required to develop new aerospace systems. MIT faculty and staff have contributed new methods for abstraction-based design with “correct-by-construction” compositional rules, probabilistic design under uncertainty and are demonstrating that a 5x speed up in the design and manufacturing of complex cyber-electro-mechanical systems is indeed possible. We are working on implementing this new integrated approach in our Unified Engineering classes starting in the 2012-13 academic year. We expect that this new approach will make our students and teams even more competitive in future competitions such as the annual AIAA Design-Build-Fly competition. Second, the CDIO (Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate) Initiative (http://www.cdio.org), an international consortium of universities collaborating to improve engineering education, continues to grow and now encompasses nearly 100 universities and programs worldwide. As part of this program MIT AeroAstro offers ambitious capstone design courses driven by real world challenges that expose our undergraduate and graduate students to the challenges of creating complex systems. An example of our commitment is the 16.810 class on Engineering Design and
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AEROASTRO 2011-2012