According to the Georgia Institute of Technology's Aaron Stebner, a professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, the university recently expanded its Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility to address this problem by bringing industry and university researchers into the same space.
“A lot of software startup companies, on the other hand, don’t have the money to invest in the hardware and equipment to do their own case studies and demos to show that it works,” he said.
Georgia Tech first established the facility in 2017 to bridge what Stebner calls the “valley of death” between research and commercial deployment. According to Stebner, the center initially focused on advanced manufacturing in aerospace, automotive and medical applications.
In 2022, the school received a $65 million grant to support statewide collaboration on artificial intelligence in manufacturing, called the Georgia Artificial Intelligence Manufacturing Technology Corridor (GA-AIM). A 2024 news release said Georgia Tech then invested more than $23 million in supporting new workforce programs, equipment and personnel, and expanding the facility with systems for AI-enabled manufacturing, robotic automation, cybersecurity testing, wireless communications and manufacturing data management. Stebner said the goal was to create an integrated environment where AI, automation and manufacturing systems can be tested together.
The renovated, 60,000-square-foot facility officially opened last month.
“We’ve designed it so that you could run the same scenarios for all different technologies, ranging from the manufacturing machines to the models people develop for improving manufacturing,” Stebner said.
Companies can participate through a consortium model, which grants access to facility time each year, or work with Georgia Tech through direct research contacts and longer-term partnership agreements.
For example, the school has partnered with the Robins Air Force Base and the U.S. Navy, using manufacturing facilities to help automate repairs on aircraft carriers.
Stebner said disparate manufacturing partners often rely on different equipment, software and data formats, so a major part of the expansion was creating a knowledge management system that links those systems. While previous collaborations required companies to agree on one platform to hold all their data, the expansion project found another option better suited to industry needs.
“The ‘one ring to rule them all’ approach isn’t viable. At some point, somebody wants something to enter their ecosystem that isn’t part of that, that doesn't conform,” he said. “What we’ve been able to develop, and one of our innovative companies has been able to develop, is a software system that can make all the connections between very different or disparate data sources and data formats … without having to move all the data around and reformat it.”
In addition to industry partnerships, the university uses the facility for teaching. Stebner said approximately 170 undergraduate students and staff have used the facility for senior design projects, research experience or hourly technical work. More than 85 students have used the space for research associated with their degree.
The facility operates as a shared user environment rather than belonging to a single faculty laboratory. Faculty researchers can use their grant funding to access equipment.
“It’s kind of this environment where you don’t have to be ready for all of it at one shot,” Stebner said. “Anybody that works in any one of the kind of technologies that need to intersect can still come in and do their part.”
Looking forward, Stebner said Georgia Tech researchers are exploring remote applications and new materials, like plastics and ceramics. He hopes to further expand access to the facility to through a programmable cloud laboratory. Under that model, researchers could submit questions remotely from anywhere, receive recommended experiments and access lab-generated data without operating equipment directly.
“We’re still probably five years away from that for educated users,” he said.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story misstated the size of the renovated facility as 20,000 square feet, which was in fact its original footprint, and referred to a programmable cloud library rather than a programmable cloud laboratory. The story has been updated with correct information.
