Remotely controlled manufacturing: A new frontier for systems research

Abstract

It has now become commonplace for applications that run on smartphones, IoT devices, and even personal computers to rely on services hosted either in the cloud or on edge servers. Some of the motivations for this trend-augmenting thin clients and enabling a shared view across users/devices-also apply to manufacturing machines such as 3D printers, laser cutters, and machine tools. Off-device control of manufacturing devices can help outdated machines benefit from the most advanced control algorithms, which they are incapable of running locally. Cloud/edge support can also enable coordinated manufacturing of a product's parts across multiple machines, thereby reducing production time and cost compared to the use of a single machine. In this paper, we highlight the challenges in realizing these benefits for the manufacturing domain.