Enriching mechanical engineering education with automation and robotics – Times of India

During the first two industrial revolutions, mechanical engineering got consolidated as a profession for designing, building, and managing machinery. Broadly, its central body of knowledge evolved to include materials, mechanics, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, machine design, and manufacturing. It is the predecessor as well as the beneficiary of other forms of engineering. It will continue to be enriched by them to conceive, design, build, and manage more sophisticated machinery with enhanced complexity, flexibility, connectivity, and automation. The fourth industrial revolution is now making this body of knowledge much more interdisciplinary as compared to the earlier industrial revolutions. Some key technologies of this revolution are AI and ML, IoT, Robots and Cobots, Big Data, 5G, Augmented and Virtual Reality, 3D and 4D printing, etc.

Machines help in scaling up the production and services and also take a share of dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs. They transform and expand our culture not only by simplifying or altering our work, but also by creating new kinds of works, environments, businesses, experiences, and even social structures. From ancient times, machines were common in many civilisations. Their monuments, textile, and handicrafts would not have been possible without the use of several machines and accessories. In ancient India, Yantramatruka, knowledge of instruments and machines, was recognized as one of the sixty-four art forms. Until the fifteenth century, China was probably the world leader in building machines.

Machines with automation mechanisms have existed since pre-historical times. Traps for hunting animals were probably the first self-operating machines. The Egyptian water clock, Persian windmill, and Chinese south-pointing chariot are examples of a few ancient self-operating machines. There were intense teaching and research activities on automatic devices from the third century BC in Alexandria. Heros Pneumatics having several innovative design descriptions became a fundamental reference for automatic machine design. Building upon this foundation, the Arab world produced several treatises on machine design during the medieval period. More than a thousand years ago, the Chinese and Japanese built some interesting self-operating machines, designed to automatically follow a sequence of operations, for recreational and other purposes.

Machine renaissance started in Italy in the fifteenth century and soon spread to other parts of Europe. Several books were written on machine design and the printing press made them easily accessible. Hydraulics saw a spectacular evolution.Many innovative war machines, business machines, e.g., saw, winemaking, cloth washing, flour mills, as well as domestic machines, e.g., fountains and fanning mechanisms were developed. The first industrial revolution that started in the UK in the eighteenth century was characterized by steam energy, machine tool industry, and mechanised factories. The Jacquard loom, invented in 1802 used punched cards to specify the weaving of patterns and pictures. The second industrial revolution in the next century saw oil, gas, electricity, internal combustion engine, communication technologies, control systems, electricity-powered assembly line factories, etc. Many new machines with greater capacity and power were developed using innovative mechanisms, diverse energy sources, and electromechanical instruments for automation and industrial process control.

The third industrial revolution was ignited by micro-electronics, digital computers, and programmable controller-based automation. Machine-systems now started getting transformed into mechatronic systems. The control mechanisms became faster, more reliable, and flexible, and the machine-systems became more sophisticated, efficient, smaller, and lighter. The ongoing fourth industrial revolution is characterised by fusions of physical, cyber, and biological worlds and smart automation.

New frontiers of industrial automation

The word automation was introduced in 1953 at Ford. Today, the advantages of industrial automation extend far beyond labour reduction and include several benefits like increased productivity and throughput, better designs, easier capacity expansion, reduced inventory, quality consistency, improved downtime, reduced setup time and transition cost, improved preventive maintenance, increased equipment life, increased safety, easier failure detection, and rectification, product flexibility, reduced energy, and wastage, etc. Automation engineersapply diverse technologies to streamline, improve, and automate manufacturing, electricity generation, warehouse, mining, and many other processes. As per the 2020 report on the Future of jobs by the World Economic Forum, robotics and industrial automation are likely to be adopted by more than 60% of companies. A McKinsey Global Survey of 2021, showed that 70% of global respondents say that their companies are piloting automation.According toMcKinsey, by 2025 smart factories will generate $37 trillion. In a 2022 report, Acumen Research and Consulting have estimated that the GlobalWarehouse Automation Marketwill exceed 64 billion USD by 2030.

Industrial automation broadly includes two aspects process automation and factory automation. Though the concept of a digital computer controlling a manufacturing plant appeared in 1948, the actual applications became available after a decade. Automation software incorporates a mix of static reasoning and AI-based dynamic reasoning. As per a forecast by Maximize Market Research, the global market for automated process control is likely to exceed 27 billion USD by 2027.

In the initial years of the third industrial revolution, in 1969, the term mechatronics was coined by Tetsuro Mori. Mechatronic systems and robots gradually became critical components for factory and logistics automation. The term robot comes from the Czech word, robota, and was first-time used in a play in 1923. Industrial robots are either fixed in place or mobile. General Motors was the first company to install an industrial robot, Unimate, in 1961 and also the first to use machine vision in an industrial setting in 1970. The 1960s and 70s saw the development of many industrial robots.

Robots are used not only for assisting or replacing human operators for dull, dirty, and dangerous work, but also for higher precision and quality work. The robotics and mechatronics applications go far beyond industrial and logistics sectors and cover construction, agriculture, defense, healthcare, infrastructure, retail, leisure and entertainment, law enforcement, etc. A 2022 report by Market Research Future estimated that with the availability of low-cost and energy-efficient robots, the total robotics market will cross 214 billion USD by 2030.In a 2022 report, The Business Research Company has projected that the global machine vision market is likely to exceed 18 billion USD by 2026. According to a Reportlinker report of 2022, the global market of AI in manufacturing will go beyond 21 billion USD by 2028.

The new manufacturing plant is emerging as an intelligent network of systems that enables facilities, machines, and logistics chains to be managed automatically with minimum human intervention. Industrial IoT makes it possible to track the operations at all levels and gather relevant data from machines and assets in real-time, making them fully visible throughout the production chain. A powerful data analytics environment can generate meaningful insights related to preventive maintenance, asset utilization, employee and asset safety, reducing energy and material needs, reducing downtime, etc. Statista has projected that the Industrial IoT market will surpass USD 1.1 trillion by 2028. The real-time data and other sources are also being used to create digital twins and continuously analyse them across their life cycles. As per a 2921 Verified Market Research report, the digital twin market is expected to exceed 108 billion USD by 2028.

According to a recent report, the engineering services outsourcing (ESO) industry has noticed a paradigm transformation from core-engineering services to embedded engineering solutions, combining automation, robotics, AI, ML, analytics, IoT,etc., and the global ESO market is projected to surpass 9 trillion USD in 2030. Indian companies can benefit a lot from this exponential growth, creating a lot of career opportunities for our engineering graduates with the right competencies.In order to serve in this area, students should develop the ability to conceive, design, implement, and manage automation systems by using principles and tools of machine design, process control, mechatronics, cyber-physical systems, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

The vision of Make-in-India, Atma-Nirbhar Bharat, and Developed India cannot be fulfilled without transforming our manufacturing facilities with automation and robotics. A large number of automation and robotics jobs are set to be in demand in India as well as overseas. Rapidly expanding global demand for robotics and mechatronic systems should be urgently leveraged by many large Indian industrial equipment, machinery, and automobile manufacturers, to make large investments in developing and manufacturing automation equipment and robots. Industry 4.0 is about the fusion of various diverse technologies, making inter-disciplinarity and systems thinking critical competencies for engineers, along with technical skills, lifelong learning, complex problem solving, critical thinking, interpersonal skills, and the ability to work in multidisciplinary teams. Some Indian engineering universities are responding well by creating many such interesting fusions in their engineering curricula.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Enriching mechanical engineering education with automation and robotics - Times of India