Design and Manufacturing
About
The Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CAM) is an interdisciplinary center in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, with participation from faculty and students specializing in Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science, Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Material Science. It is housed in 6,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility located north of the USC Campus near downtown Los Angeles. CAM features latest computer controlled machining, polymer processing, and additive manufacturing capabilities. It also offers a wide variety of automation, robotics, and measurement technologies. CAM members also have access to software for creating digital models and visualizing them using augmented and virtual reality technologies.
CAM supports the Viterbi School of Engineering and its partners by conducting basic and applied research in the manufacturing area to enable innovation. Researchers at CAM aim to share manufacturing expertise and research results with companies in the Southern California region to transition research results into practice. CAM organizes events to identify new opportunities in manufacturing area and launch new initiatives to address them. CAM offers interdisciplinary manufacturing education programs, as well as outreach support to the K-12 education community. CAM also provides the Southern California community with access to advanced manufacturing capabilities.
CAM focus areas include:
- Additive Manufacturing: These processes aim to use of digital models to automatically build a component by depositing material(s) in layers without requiring any part specific tooling. CAM is developing new additive manufacturing processes for realizing multi-material and multiscale structures, composite structures, and metal parts. Work being done at CAM in this area is expected to democratize manufacturing, empower innovators, enable innovation, and reduce barriers to create new businesses based on new products.
- Robotics and Automation: We are interested in using rapidly reconfigurable and deployable robotics and automation technologies that can be used in low production volume applications to make domestic production cost competitive and enhance national security by reducing reliance on imported goods. Representative projects in this area include mobile manipulation, robotic assembly of compliant parts, automation for meso and micro assemblies, automated finishing, robot-assisted additive manufacturing, and automation of composites fabrication.
- Smart Manufacturing: We are integrating sensors, networking, and analytics technologies to improve manufacturing operations by improving resource utilization and enabling fast recovery from errors. Representative projects in this area include improved process modeling and control through Internet-of-Things, efficient resource utilization and optimization using big data, energy efficient automation and manufacturing, modeling, prediction, and control for personalized manufacturing, and cyber-physical security for factories
- Digital Manufacturing: We are developing simulation, visualization, analytics, planning, optimization, and collaboration tools to reduce product development time, enable innovation, and reduce waste. Representative projects in this area include high fidelity simulations of manufacturing processes, augmented and virtual reality for training human operators, manufacturing system design and optimization, automated planning, and automated instruction generation.
Published on March 30th, 2017
Last updated on July 14th, 2022