Industrial Robots Build with Lego Bricks at Mill 19

Since the celebrated opening of Mill 19 four years ago, Carnegie Mellon University's Manufacturing Futures Institute (MFI) has been steadily outfitting the advanced manufacturing facility with state-of-the-art equipment to support its expanding research efforts and fulfill its mission to inspire, engineer and lead technological and workforce advances for agile, intelligent, efficient, resilient and sustainable manufacturing. The latest addition to the facility is a flexible robotic test bed. Four six-axis industrial robot arms equipped with multiple sensors surround a worktable in the second floor mezzanine area of MFI's Mill 19 Building A location. Ceiling-mounted programmable light curtains provide safety by sensing when humans get too close to the robots, and the system then immediately disables their motion. Designed initially to test and advance robotic assembly and disassembly using Lego bricks, the test bed is also capable of being used to study other robotic functions in manufacturing, such as material handling, quality inspection and more complex manipulation to thread small fasteners, to route electrical wiring and even to assemble food items into snack packs. Two autonomous mobile robots will be used to deliver Lego bricks to and from the robot arms as well as in research aimed at training robots to move other materials and supplies efficiently and safely throughout a facility. "We've built this test bed to accommodate both current and future research," said Gary Fedder , MFI faculty director.