Smart Manufacturing Demonstration

Overview

The project aims to create a smart manufacturing system using Lego Mindstorms to demonstrate some the smart manufacturing concepts to Behrend’s visitors and K-12 students. The system will produce small tealight candles and it invoves multiple stations from which data can be collected via sensors to monitor and improve the system.

Objectives

• Create a portable manufacturing system that utilizes smart manufacturing technologies
• Collect various types of data within the system to monitor the status of the system

Approach

• The first step was to meet with our sponsor to develop a list of customer needs that the team would use as parameters for the project.
• A preliminary concept generation process where different manufacturing system concepts were considered looking at their different challenges and benefits.
• Four preliminary concepts were chosen for concept screening and basic designs were made for concepts that produced: a plastic token, a clay token, a Lego man, and a tealight candle
• The tealight concept was selected as the best demonstration of smart manufacturing that could be achieved using Lego Mindstorms.
• Prototypes of the system were made
• The final system was constructed and tested to ensure the system works safely and all the sensors are working properly.

Outcomes

• A working demonstrational smart manufacturing system that uses sensors to operate.
• Given the time constraints, the team was unable to implement data collection into the system but this could be implemented by another group that our sponsor chooses to expand the project, such as adding data collection sensors that report the data to a website.