Flexible Manufacturing Lab

Room 307 Transportation Building

The Flexible Manufacturing Lab gives undergraduate students a hands-on gateway into the world of industrial automation and smart manufacturing. Here, students don’t just learn how modern factories work—they build and program them.

The lab includes:

Six PLC training stations for exploring industrial control logic
Two 5-degree-of-freedom articulated robots for hands-on robotics programming
A tabletop CNC milling machine for digital manufacturing
A fully integrated flexible manufacturing cell featuring automated material handling

Students start with the fundamentals using ladder diagrams to program programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and advance to complex tasks like scheduling and controlling unmanned guided vehicles.

With industrial robots, students dive into the mechanics of motion, learning robot joint types and identifying Denavit-Hartenberg parameters to mathematically model robotic systems.

At the CNC workcenter, students design components using Autodesk Inventor and use FANUC-based CAM software to convert digital models into physical parts, milled from wax blocks. This full design-to-manufacture process highlights the complete product lifecycle.

Students will also interact with all aspects within a flexible manufacturing cell- CAD, PLC and robot programming, networking, and CAM. A mobile robot moves materials between stations, creating a live demonstration of an automated production system.

The Flexible Manufacturing Lab transforms theory into real-world capability preparing students to lead in the era of Industry 4.0 and beyond.