Last week, UNH held its Summer Undergraduate STEM Research Symposium, culminating a six-week internship program on the Durham campus. Presenters included eight AI in Manufacturing interns who worked at the John Olson Advanced Manufacturing Center. Focused on workforce development, the program included students from the Community College System of New Hampshire and other colleges and universities throughout the region.
An overarching theme among the projects was integration—getting mechanical components, electrical systems, and software to work together. In many cases, this involved a closed-loop control system, in which real-time feedback was used to inform process parameters, data collection, or movement.
Intern Patrick Truong, mentored by graduate student Saber Omidi, developed a user interface in Python to control a mobile robot and integrated a proportional-integral-derivative, or PID, controller to ensure the robot moved in a consistent pattern.
Interns Elisabeth Connors and Keith Horgan, mentored by graduate student Rene Ebunle, fabricated an electromagnetically controlled balance beam that integrated a PID controller to balance a ball. Their work included calculating the gains for the system and using a program called Scilab to run simulations and evaluate its stability.
Intern Alex Gruden, mentored by graduate student Turner Totten, wrote a program that used material and surface-roughness information to determine the uncertainty of infrared camera data. The program will be used in the Center’s additive manufacturing research and development.
Intern Evan Allard, also mentored by Turner, created a design of experiments for the Olson Center’s metal additive manufacturing research to help identify potential process parameter sets. The experiments involved varying spindle speed, feed rate, and traverse rate during the metal additive process to determine which factors had the greatest impact on print quality.
Interns Maria Wheeler, Finn Milutinovich, and Jesse Mertz worked with Olson Center lead intern Owen Mahanes to improve a mobile ABB robot cart used for metal additive repairs and other machining processes at the point of need. The team upgraded the robot and motors and designed and fabricated adapter plates for the new hardware. Maria focused on the cart’s electrical components, Finn on the mounting plates, and Jesse on the team’s improvements to the system inherited from a previous student group.
The summer program is supported by the Northeast Integrated Intelligent Manufacturing Lab (NIIM), which is funded through a National Science Foundation Research Infrastructure Improvement Track-2 Focused EPSCoR Collaboration award (NSF Award No. 2218063).
Written by Katie Ahearn
AI in Manufacturing Team
- Co-Principal Investigator: Pablo Se Young Yoon
Internship Director: Stephen Hale
Olson Center Program Manager: Cordi Norris
- Graduate Student Mentor: Saber Omidi
- Graduate Student Mentor: Rene Ebunle
- Olson Center Lead Intern and Mechanical Engineering Senior: Owen Mahanes
- Intern: Alexander Gruden
- Intern: Elisabeth Connors
- Intern: Evan Allard
- Intern: Finn Milutinovich
- Intern: Jesse Mertz
- Intern: Keith Horgan
- Intern: Maria Wheeler
- Intern: Patrick Truong
