The factory of the future will be driven by a seamless integration of cyber-enabled software and physical machines to increase manufacturing flexibility, agility and ultimately production efficiency. In this cybermanufacturing environment, the foundational physical asset is the individual manufacturing machine on a shop floor which processes raw materials/in-process workpieces into final products. The core design configuration of these machines has changed little over decades, with proprietary hardware and control configurations that vary among machine tool builders. This fragmented and closed machine architecture hinders the development of software for cyberphysical machines. This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award supports fundamental research into transforming the individual machine tool on a manufacturing shop floor into software defined machines, wherein software determines the operational characteristics of a particular machine. The results of this research will lay the foundation of an open source Industrial Machine Operating System (IMOS) which will provide the capability to individual developers, researchers and organizations to write software applications for various manufacturing processes. This research involves several disciplines which include manufacturing process planning, embedded computing, compiler optimization and machine tool control system theory. This multi-disciplinary research combining manufacturing and computing sciences will educate a new generation of scientists and engineers leading to improved US competitiveness in cybermanufacturing.
The Industrial Machine Operating System will provide horizontal and vertical resource management within a machine tool's hardware and software components. This operating system will be built on the open sourced Linux kernel by a software stack that provides hardware abstraction, packaged libraries, an application framework and user defined applications installed on a manufacturing machine such as a milling machine. The value of the operating system concept will be demonstrated through two unique aspects critical to cybermanufacturing: 1) Demonstration of the direct transfer of design and manufacturing process data to machine instructions on an embedded computing platform while making use of internationally accepted product documentation formats, and 2) Establishment of the rules behind Just-In-Time compilation and code optimization of manufacturing process data during run-time memory within an embedded computing system. The above merits will be demonstrated through the machine operating system framework, intended to be scalable and adaptable to various memory architectures.
