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Manufacturing is entering a period of substantial innovation and change driven by the increased integration of sensors and the Internet-of-things (IoT), increased data availability, and advances in robotics and automaton. This leads to pervasive digitalization of the factory and challenges manufacturing enterprises to reconsider, reexamine, and reevaluate their present operations and future strategic directions in the new era known as Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0. Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI), especially Machine Learning (ML) have shown great potential to transform the manufacturing domain through advanced analytics tools for processing the vast amounts of manufacturing data generated, known as Big Data.
The project that we work with General Dynamics is on adaptive online control for open-architectured manufacturing processes. General Dynamics is one of the world leaders in defense, with revenues around $30 billion per year. With the advanced multivariable control method, the overall manufacturing costs were reduced by 10%. In conducting this research, General Dynamics provides the group a CNC lathe free usage for experimental validation on the project. It is an Okuma two-turret lathe, weighs about 25,000 lb, with accuracy of one ten-thousandth of an inch. The electric spindle drive motor is at 60 HP for heavy load turning operations.
Figure 1. Okuma LC40-2ST two-turret CNC lathe (a) Overview; (b) Inside settings. |
