As the AMRC marks more than a decade of supporting UK manufacturers in reconfigurable manufacturing, Dr Lloyd Tinkler, senior technical fellow for electrical machines, speaks about the impact it has made.

Article featured in the latest issue of the AMRC Journal.

A government study published in 2013 on ‘The factory of the future’ sparked the idea for the AMRC to begin exploring reconfigurable manufacturing. 

The report, which examined the trends to shape and influence the future of manufacturing, included a recommendation from AMRC founder Keith Ridgway for ‘a design of agile, reconfigurable factories and extended enterprises’. 

But what actually is reconfigurable manufacturing? It can be defined as a system designed for rapid change in its structure, as well as its hardware and software components, to enable quick adjustments to production capacity and functionality in response to sudden market or system changes.  

Lloyd said the reconfigurable manufacturing theme of research is intimately connected with the AMRC’s flagship Factory 2050 facility and is one of the main drivers behind why it was built and why it is home to the suite of technologies that are the focus of engineers’ research. 

“The motivation behind this research area is to help UK manufacturers to be more agile and adjust what they produce and how much of it - and can allow them to be more competitive on the global marketplace,” Lloyd adds. 

Discussing why reconfigurable manufacturing is important to the AMRC, Lloyd explained: “In high-value manufacture, the production volumes are typically low and therefore manufacturers cannot necessarily use the same automation as in mass production to remain globally competitive, so for example, solutions to manufacture a car, can't be applied to making an aircraft.  

“Reconfigurable manufacturing systems means that we can bring some of the benefits of automation such as improvements in quality, throughput and increased traceability to this lower volume production.

“As we’re a high-wage economy, we can’t compete by throwing more people at it, we need to be smarter about how we produce things – and being more agile in what we produce and how much of it. 

“This has run through from the very opening of Factory 2050, it’s run through all of the projects, including the use of digital work instructions, providing people with the support so they can produce more products of different variants.”

The concept of a reconfigurable cell is extremely powerful for sustainability targets. The cell could initially be configured to perform some manufacturing process and then be reconfigured to do the disassembly of the product and even reconfigured again to inspect and sort the raw materials. This enables the realisation of a truly circular economy but all done in a singular cell, without the need for commissioning expensive individual cells.

Over the past decade, the AMRC, which is part of the High Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult network of research centres, has developed reconfigurable manufacturing from an initial literature review on key technologies. These included robotics, autonomous mobile robots, smart tools and digital technologies to provide instructions to operators and digital architecture to connect all these devices and allow data to flow around the factory - alongside development of a small scale demonstration funded by AMRC membership.  

This demonstrated pivotal ideas and key concepts such as modularity and scalability to aid reconfiguration, and integrability through the use of  message queuing transport telemetry (MQTT) communication protocol to connect legacy hardware into an internet of things (IoT) system. 

What followed, with funding from the HVM Catapult, was the AMRC developed the full-sized reconfigurable factory demonstrator cell (RECON) currently in use at the AMRC Factory 2050. 

Since then the RECON cell has been used for shorter turnaround projects for a number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), automating the handling of parts in galvanisation processes, construction of modular housing and the assembly of large magnets for wind power generators - helping to make this work faster and cheaper. 

In the latter project for Sheffield SME, Magnomatics, AMRC engineers demonstrated the reduction in installation time from 55 minutes, to 55 seconds for each of the 204 magnet cassettes which make up the rotor; addressing a key bottleneck in scaling-up production.

“For me, this project showed a clear use for our RECON cell that was used for its intended purpose. We were able to demonstrate something and take it apart in a timely manner - which took just a couple of weeks,” said Lloyd. “It was a perfect example of showing the benefit of having that reconfigurable flexibility.” 

In terms of what the future holds for reconfigurable manufacturing at the AMRC, Lloyd said: “Our aim is to try to address one of the big challenges we grapple with at the moment: that although things are reconfigurable, like Lego bricks that all click together, there then remains significant work to reprogram it to get things to run properly. 

“This is exactly the challenge we are addressing through the EPSRC-funded R3M (Reconfigurable Robots for Responsive Manufacture) project which started in September 2021 and will finish in early 2025.”

The consortium for R3M, led by Cranfield University, alongside support by Loughborough University and colleagues at the University of Sheffield and the AMRC, has been created to develop software tools which can accelerate the reconfiguration process to make this concept viable in real world manufacturing. 

The project aims to develop a tool which automatically generates robot code using robot operating system (ROS2) from human readable instructions in automation markup language (AML), develop robust control strategies which ensure these programs can be deployed into the real world and then automatically assess the risks associated with the reconfigured system to ensure this can be safely deployed.

Lloyd said that the goal over the next few years is to have more intelligent systems that can avoid a human going in and correcting the programs that can be created to produce particular components – reprogramming robots, reprogramming machine tools - reducing the time and effort to switch between different processes and products, and unlocking the benefits of reconfigurable manufacturing

He added: “We are on a journey that’s not yet reached its end. There’s more work still to do and it’s looking to be an exciting time ahead.”