Foggy with rain developing after midnight. Low 43F. Winds E at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall around a half an inch..
Foggy with rain developing after midnight. Low 43F. Winds E at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall around a half an inch. SILICA SOL Casting
Impact Institute Instructor Doug Maley, right, explains some features of a mechatronics station to students working in the iSMART robotics lab at the Community Learning Center in Kendallville.
The first words, as written by a Fanuc robotic arm programmed by Impact Institute students at the iSMART robotics lab, hang on the lab wall in the Community Learning Center in Kendallville.
Students work at the mechatronics station with help from instructor Doug Maley.
Impact Institute Instructor Doug Maley, right, explains some features of a mechatronics station to students working in the iSMART robotics lab at the Community Learning Center in Kendallville.
The first words, as written by a Fanuc robotic arm programmed by Impact Institute students at the iSMART robotics lab, hang on the lab wall in the Community Learning Center in Kendallville.
Students work at the mechatronics station with help from instructor Doug Maley.
KENDALLVILLE — In a frame on the wall of the iSMART robotics lab is a sheet of torn-out notebook paper, immortalizing “robot’s first words.”
Toward the top of the page, in red marker is the robotic arm’s name, FANUC.
The letters are blocky and unevenly written. The lines vary in thickness. The name slopes slightly down and to the right, looking like a youngster concentrating hard to do it right and doing OK but not quite perfect.
Right underneath is a second sheet of yellow paper, FANUC written in perfect letters in perfect alignment and underlined. That unframed page is tagged “robot second words.”
Impact Institute Instructor Doug Maley tells the story behind the two pages and it’s a good microcosm of what the iSMART robotics is all about.
While he was assisting some students with some work, the other high schoolers decided to start messing around with the table-mounted robotic arm in the corner of the lab. They figured out on their own how to get it to hold the marker and how to get it moving to start writing.
When Maley came over to check, they proudly produced Fanuc’s first words to him.
Not bad, Maley said. But, if they had saved the coordinates for the strokes of the market, they could have written a program to get the robotic arm to write its name on it owns, without their assistance, over and over and over and over again, as many times as they needed.
The students went back to work. Made their own ring and attached it to the table to hold the marker standing up. Worked on a program. Taught Fanuc to pick up the marker and write its name.
Their second attempt came out much better the first. And not only that, with the program written, they can now have Fanuc write its name the exact same way, any time they want, as many times as they need.
Maley laughs. The kids probably thought they were goofing off, playing around with the robotic arm while teacher was distracted. Instead, they ended up generating their own lesson and learned something along the way.
And, in the end, that is what the Impact Institute iSMART lab is all about.
“We’re dual credit with Ivy Tech. It’s a two-year program. In the two years, they can get four certifications from SACA (Smart Automation Certification Alliance). They’re life the industry leader in certifying Industry 4.0,” Maley said. “We study automation and technology, manufacturing systems, robotics systems, information systems.”
The lab is packed with training equipment and the mandate that students gets hands-on with it during class to test it out, learn how it works, solve problems, diagnoses issues, troubleshoot errors, try, fail, learn and, eventually, master.
There are 3-D printers, a CNC mil, two different types of robots, a mechatronics station, AC/DC current trainers, pneumatics stations, hydraulic stations, programmable logic controllers, relay trainers, control panels training boards and more.
The lab at the Community Learning Center in Kendallville was funded in part by $198,450 in funding from northeast Indiana’s READI funds, with support from the Noble County Economic Development Corp., the Dekko Foundation, the Don Wood Foundation and in partnership with Impact Institute, Freedom Academy.
“The enthusiasm with everyone it was pitched to made it super easy,” said Lori Gagen, operations director for Be Noble, the Noble County EDC. “This might be the easiest project for an EDC to conceive of and see through because of the partners who came to it.”
The lab came together earlier this year and enrolled its first students this fall. Right now, Maley has 12 high school juniors and seniors enrolled and expects to pick up more in coming years as the program becomes better known by students. At full capacity, the iSMART lab could probably take about three-dozen students.
“Seventy percent of class time is to teach what’s required at state level,” Maley said. “The other 30%, students pick a project.”
Some of the students who enrolled already have an idea of a manufacturing or industrial career ahead of them and are working toward gaining skills and specializing to make them more attractive to employers or training programs upon graduation.
One guy in class wants to learn about fluid power, Maley said. One student would like to work in animatronics in a place like Disney World. Several students are college-bound on engineering tracks and are picking up mechanical skills in the iSMART lab. And some have no idea what they wanted to do and signed up because the class sounded cool and now are getting an opportunity to try out many things and see what might catch their interest, Maley said.
“They’re going to have college credit. It prepares them for a tech degree, entry-level maintenance, entry-level process technician, manufacturing engineer,” Maley said. “Anybody going into manufacturing, even if they’re going to be an operator, this is important to them.”
While all of the equipment is a huge opportunity for students, Maley himself is a big asset in the lab. He started is industry career as a journeyman electrician and eventually worked for 35 years as an engineer in controls and maintenance management.
Maley geeks out as he gets rolling talking about how he fell in love with sensors and controls and transitioned away from straight electrician work into that field. He installed his first programmable logic controller in 1987, he notes.
His last job was working for an OEM manufacturer, but when COVID hit and the supply chain crashed and parts backlogs stalled manufacturing, he was worked out of a job. Teaching had never really been a career path for him, but when he heard about the Impact Institute job, he decided to take the plugne.
“I’ve always wanted to do something to help people. I love it. Controls are near and dear to my heart. I’ve been doing it since I was 22 and it’s fun for me to do. It gives me a lot of joy.”
The difference between Maley and his students, though, is that they’re getting the opportunity to learn now while still in school. Back in the day, the skills he picked up were often either second-hand on the job training with a supervisor — who may not always have known exactly what they were doing when fixing a problem, or fixing it the right or best way — or by tinkering on the job or off the clock to learn.
“You had to work with the systems. You had to work with the sensors. It was a lot of figuring it out on your own,” Maley said about his learning experience.
Now, students are getting to learn those skills while still in school, with the hope that they can step into a future job with two years of training and a significant leg up on other people who just walk into an industrial job with no specific skills to their name.
On this particular day, Maley’s students were working on a mechantronics station and learning about different types of sensors. The setup they were working on takes different types of picks as input and it needs to be programmed to first recognize things like color or material (plastic or metal) and then sort those pucks into their appropriate chutes.
Adding to the sensor and sorting, the station could also be expanded to add a robotic arm that will pick up the pucks, drop them into appropriate bins on a conveyor and move it to the dropoff.
While this is a much smaller and simple version, that kind of process is something you could imagine on a much larger scale in a big production plant.
Sensors have become a huge part of cutting-edge smart manufacturing, because no only do they have applications in the production process, sensors are now being used to monitor the equipment itself. That has applications in the maintenance realm, adjacent to production.
“Machines have progressed to the point where they can predict their own failure, schedule their own maintenance, order their own parts,” Maley said. “We no longer have ‘down time.’ We have ‘scheduled maintenance.’”
“Manufacturing 4.0, we’re in a new industrial revolution where we’re using data-driven decisions,” he said.
The robotics lab is also important because many manufacturers are investing more into automation, both as a means to increase productivity but also because of ongoing labor shortages that is forcing employers to do as much or more with fewer bodies.
For example, Maley recalled one plant he worked in where the human worked side-by-side with a robot all day. The robot’s job was to lift heavy auto transmissions all day — sparing humans from the wear and tear and accident potential of physical labor — and hold and turn them while the worker added components or completed inspections.
That kind of ongoing shift and innovation in the workforce makes the iSMART lab even more valuable, said Impact Institute Director Jim Walmsley.
“It’s very important. I think we’re starting to see this as the next generation of opportunity in the world of manufacturing especially, but it’s going to make it into other industries as well,” Walmsley said. We’re preparing these students to do what I say often, the goal, philosophy, is work-ready or better prepared for that next step.
“Our best thing we can do is help train up that next group,” he said.
Down the hall from the iSMART lab you’ll find a second lab run by Freedom Academy. It’s similar in scope but with some additional advanced equipment.
It’s similar in the sense that it’s teaching a lot of the same skills as Impact’s space — basic electricity, motor controls, hydraulics, pneumatics, logic controllers, robotics, intricate circuits — but one difference is that Instructor Ron Wolfe’s students aren’t in high school but are employees sent to him specifically for this type of training.
At the Freedom Academy lab, those students get their hands-on training, while Wolfe is a big proponent of teaching general troubleshooting. Every employer is different and every piece of machinery is going to be different, but if students leave with rounded knowledge about how systems generally work and how to diagnose and fix common problems, that is a huge benefit.
“I actually have companies that send people who want to be in maintenance,” Wolfe said. “They send them to us first. It’s a really good program and there’s a big demand.”
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