Background
This project was funded through an ARM Institute Project Call that sought to respond to pervasive areas of need in U.S. manufacturing and, specifically, address key Department of Defense (DoD) manufacturing-focused Modernization Priorities. This and the other selected projects address issues found by the DoD and commercial community to be the most urgent and important that the ARM Institute’s ecosystem of 330+ member organizations can help solve.
Objective & Technical Approach
The project team aims to develop fundamental technologies for robotic handling of energetic materials. Manufacturing with energetic materials imposes numerous constraints on the manufacturing process; paramount among these are limitations on the mass of energetic material that can be present at any given time within a given space.
This project seeks to reduce this exposure by applying robotics to an energetics refilling operation. Execution of this project will demonstrate safety systems, robotic manipulation strategies and designs that are immediately applicable to manufacturing of shaped charges, as well as more broadly to the production of other devices and products that use energetics and advance the state of the art in this field.
Participants
Principal Investigator: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Partners: Schlumberger, Interface Technologies, FANUC