NSF has awarded Rutgers a $3M Future Manufacturing grant titled "FMRG: Cyber: Manufacturing USA: NextG-Enabled Manufacturing of the Future (NextGEM)." This major NSF project is led by Henry Rutgers Professor Yuebin Guo (PI) together with four Co-PIs (Yingying Chen and Narayan Mandayam of ECE, Jingang Yi of MAE, and Grace Guo of ISE) and senior person Ivan Seskar of Winlab. The project is one of five NSF “Future Manufacturing” research projects funded in 2023.
Future smart manufacturing should be flexible, versatile, scalable, modular, and plug-and-play in contrast to the conventional static manufacturing paradigm. This future manufacturing paradigm has stringent requirements of ultra-low latency, highly flexible connectivity, high reliability, and high computing intelligence. However, the current long end-to-end latency, limited flexibility, and the lack of computational intelligence in shop floors impose critical barriers to achieve such a future manufacturing paradigm. The advent of 5G and future 6G (NextG) wireless communication holds the key to overcome these challenging barriers and reshape future manufacturing fundamentally. This project will develop a NextG-enabled manufacturing (NextGEM) research framework, an open-access NextGEM cyberinfrastructure, and use-inspired testbeds to enable and demonstrate transformative manufacturing capabilities. The outcome of this project will not only advance the knowledge base of ultra-low latency manufacturing but also translate the enabling technologies into broad practice. The created knowledge, methods, tools, and diverse digital workforce will transform a wide spectrum of latency-critical manufacturing sectors and other industries with similar challenges to realize significant business values such as improved operation efficiencies, reduced defects, and emerging Industry 4.0 economic growth.
More details of the project can be found at:
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2328260&HistoricalAward...