The Indiana Manufacturing Competitiveness Center (INMaC) is a 30,000 square feet manufacturing environment located off of Yeager Road in the Purdue Research Park. Its mission is to make Indiana manufacturers more globally competitive through programs focused on workforce development, research in areas that advance manufacturing competitiveness, and facilitating technology transfer and adoption.  In pursuit of these aims, INMaC launched the digital manufacturing test-bed with a focus on industry 4.0 applications. Industry 4.0 represents the integration of cyber-physical systems in manufacturing. Important Industry 4.0 domain areas include the internet of things, cloud and edge computing, artificial intelligence, digital twin, and automation.

L2L is curating an advanced manufacturing environment at INMaC for the deployment of a 5G private wireless network and WiFi6e network. The creation of this environment is being supported in part from sponsored research dollars from Cisco and Wistron. These sponsored research programs are focused on understanding WiFi and 5G network performance across different use cases and advancing autonomous mobile robots (AMR) technologies.

The advanced manufacturing environment is an ideal setting to evaluate and test use cases for manufacturing in areas such as autonomous mobile robots, machine automation and monitoring, IoT, digital twin, edge compute for artificial intelligence and machine learning, and augmented and virtual reality.

Connectivity is a key enabler for “smart” applications and foundational to the creation of the manufacturing environment that is well aligned with Purdue’s newly launched Purdue Computes and Institute for Physical Artificial Intelligence initiatives.