Learning Factory prepares students for Industry 4.0 | VTx

Bill Donohue, executive director of GenEdge Alliance – an organization that leverages federal and state funding to help Virginia manufacturers and businesses – invests $120,000 a year to fund Virginia Tech Industrial and Systems Engineering senior design projects conducted in the Learning Factory.

“The Learning Factory is really going to accelerate the development of students at Virginia Tech who can then move on to industries, help those industries adopt the new 4.0 technologies, and become more successful,” said Donohue. “So we’re very excited by this investment.”

One such student is Lilly Coleman, ‘21, whose senior design team used “open source software and some engineering elbow grease” to create a new data connection and monitoring system.

“By using the handbook we produced, we projected that a company could save an average of about 20 hours of programmer time in their connection automation [or] just over $8.3 million in potential time savings across the industry,” said Coleman.

“On a more personal learning note,” she added, “the understanding I was able to grasp of the importance of data has really helped me as I start my career. A lot of my current focus at work is on automating data sources and getting closer to real time analysis, so understanding the open source software and connection methods I became familiar with in the Learning Factory has given me a massive leg up.”

Likewise, the Learning Factory also serves as an incubator for companies to train existing employees and test new manufacturing technologies before investing capital – and disrupting assembly lines – to incorporate new equipment into their factories.

Scott Weimer, executive director of Roanoke Regional Initiatives, part of Outreach and International Affairs, supervises a $45,360 GO Virginia grant to help local companies embrace these technologies and address workforce training opportunities.

“We’re connecting employers in the region with the talent and resources at the Learning Factory to identify areas of potential collaboration. By listening to manufacturers and identifying their needs, the Learning Factory can develop workforce training programs that fill skills gaps among new and current employees and build an even more competitive workforce,” Weimer said.

In addition to GenEdge, the Learning Factory is sponsored by Moog, Northrop Grumman, Innotek, Association for Manufacturing Technology, Autodesk, Kennametal, Rize, SMC, Collins Aerospace, Azoth, Student Engineers Council, Solar Connexion, and Virginia Tech’s Green Engineering Program.

Despite all its promise, the Learning Factory acknowledges the challenges of the Industry 4.0 world it is helping to shape.

The drive toward connecting individual machines and entire factories via the Internet and cloud computing has sparked the need for advanced cybersecurity to protect industries from malware attacks. It’s an area that’s providing Virginia Tech’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with a real-world research opportunity.

And skeptics may view all the automation – the cobots and robots, 3D printers, and interconnectivity of it all – as a threat to human jobs.

But according to Donohue, “We have been trying to get companies to realize that we’re at peak employment now. Everybody is fighting for the same workers. We’re trying to get people to upgrade their skills from being just a welder to someone who can set up multiple welding machines and can do higher functions … someone who can become a more attractive employee and be more satisfied with their job.”

Someone who can not only build a better widget, but design it and oversee its entire production, using renewable power of course, from anywhere in the world.

Written by Michael Hemphill