Advancing Automation

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Dr. Phil Voglewede has a professional background in manufacturing and has been at Marquette University for the past 15 years, where he’s a professor and associate chair of the mechanical engineering department. He was recently named director of Marquette’s new Omron Advanced Automation Lab. In this interview, Phil shares his vision and mission for the lab, and how Industry 4.0 automation must be approached differently than the automation boom of the 1980s and 1990s.

Barry Matties: Phil, let’s start with an introduction to the lab.

Phil Voglewede: The lab is quite unique as it is a lab of failure. When Omron gave us the gift, they asked if I wanted a system integrator. I vehemently refused. I said, “I want to try to do it.” For example, I'm not a computer scientist, I don't know how to create an IT infrastructure. You learn by just stumbling through it. That’s what we're trying to do in the lab.

Matties: What’s the purpose for the lab? What is your area of focus?

Voglewede: I do most of my work in motion: How you make things move the way you want them to move, whether it's in a manufacturing environment or in products, such as label makers, CT scanners, and so on. 

However, this lab is bigger than just motion. This lab is established with a million-dollar gift for teaching Industry 4.0. I call it a “lab of failure” rather than a “showcase of perfection.” We’re trying to “fail” at automation. That way, we can get better at understanding where the pinch points are when implementing automation and Industry 4.0 techniques into your overall Industry 4.0 framework.

We bought four robots to make a robotic cell: a SCARA-type robot, an anthropomorphic robot, and two 6-axis cobots. I hired some undergraduate students and told them to make it all work together. That's all the information I gave them, and we worked hand-in-hand to see what would work. The students wanted a task for the robots, so we’ve settled on putting together little DUPLO trees. It's something that toddlers can do very well, but machinery struggles with.

Even on this contrived task, we have failed early and often. We struggled to do easy things like setting IP addresses on some of the robots so we could communicate with them, because we didn't understand masks and subnets, and how those all things work together. The failure has been so beneficial because it’s synonymous to the problems with the digital twin. If we can't even communicate on the first level, we can’t get to this other data. Because we failed and learned from our failure, I understand how to add more sensors and equipment with their own IP addresses, which gets me closer to the digital twin. We just dive in, so we can see where and how we fail.

What's great about Omron is that they've allowed me to do it this way. This is not a grant; this is a gift they gave us. They said, “Just go play.” We've had some companies already ask to play in our sandbox, hoping to explore some of these questions: “How do you do this? Can you help us?” We don't promise anything except we will muddle through it like a customer would and learn from it.

To read this entire conversation, which appeared in the July 2023 issue of SMT007 Magazine, click here.