Mini-Factory will not be a destination per se, but rather a milestone to implant a teaching and research culture where boundaries between disciplines are melt away more than ever. The Faculty and students from Colleges of Engineering (CoE), College of Science (CoS) and College of Information Technology (CIT) will work collaboratively to process and program the Mini-Factory robots for value-added industrial applications (e.g. how could IoT be used to 3D print an innovative material?). If a fourth industrial revolution is foreseen, then it is likely that a considerable portion of today’s engineering and IT curricula will need to be updated. It is estimated that 65% of students will fulfil jobs that do not exist today. This project is a step towards the future of education.

Description

This project is restricted to the procurements, handover, and set-up of the Mini-Factory, which consists of a collection of equipment and industrial robots that are programmable to act solely as automated workstations, or collaboratively as a group of workstations through IoT and Cloud Computing. The success criteria are to deliver a small-scale (around 4m x 4m) Mini-Factory as a quick win and a large scale (more than 500m²) Mini-Factory that combines these concepts for research and education purposes, which, we anticipate, will gain the interest of stakeholders from within UAEU (measured in terms of number of UAEU programs/courses that use the Mini-Factory) and from outside UAEU (measured in terms of number of sponsors and partners interested in the Mini-Factory)

Objectives

The objectives of the Mini-Factory Lab are as follows:

• Establish the facilities required to teach Industry 4.0 concepts for manufacturing to align with United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) 4IR strategy.
• Establish an industrial robot-research lab to conduct state of the art research in the area of AI and automation.