Robotic cell usage in industry: The rebirth of a frontier for Manufacturing Engineering Education

Abstract

The American manufacturing workforce is currently not well-trained to undertake increased modern day usage of robotics in the workplace 1. In the past robots and computers were primarily used to aid in routine and dangerous tasks. The skill level necessary for operators, on these systems, were very specialized in nature, as different manufacturers had differing coding and operating schemes. The robotic systems employed were generally inflexible to changes in the product itself, product demand or even working on a queue of products in the same family. In the past decade there has been a major push in the field of robotic design for integrated robotic systems that work in tandem with human operators, making them more flexible and also imbuing them with an innate ability to produce multiple products in small lots and in a just-in-time manner. This added ability allows robots, that in the past worked independently, to communicate with other robots in flexible robotic cells and with human supervisors, sharing information, such as cycle time, work-in-progress, and problems associated with the undertaking of a routine. As more manufacturing firms continue to adopt operational improvement strategies like lean or agile manufacturing the focus will now shift to the integration of robots into the manufacturing system. Our current Manufacturing Engineering Education programs, nationwide, need to be aware of this impending change and how to embark upon introducing these concepts into the curriculum. This paper sets forth a framework for which systems engineering and robotics can coexist in our current pedagogical environments. The framework is based on the modification of the Manufacturing Engineering Program at Indiana State University. By utilizing, an interview session with one of North America's largest producer of oriented polypropylene films, the framework established seeks to find common ground for all manufacturing engineering programs nationwide. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.