A Model for Industry-University Collaborative Research: Transforming Specific Problem Solution into Broad Design Methodologies

Industrial collaboration can be an important dimension of university research; it provides real world problem motivation and application, as well as the resource and support to conduct the research. Working with industry, however, also presents many challenges, not the least of which is being able to balance and satisfy both the goal of the company (to solve a specific problem) and the mission of a research university (to foster broader intellectual advancement). In this lecture we will talk about the model developed at the Center for Automation Technologies and Systems (CATS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) for successfully transforming specific problem solutions into broad design methodologies. In addition we will discuss the important role of government funding agencies to facilitate this process as well as issues such as intellectual property (IP), transfer of technologies, and licensing. Two examples of the execution of our industry-university collaboration model will be presented: cycle time reduction in electronic packaging machines and automated manufacturing of membrane electrode assembly in fuel cells. In both examples, we conducted applied research and developed prototype systems at CATS to demonstrate feasibility, and then assisted the companies to transfer the technologies into their production systems. At the same time, the companies assisted us to obtain government funding to conduct more fundamental research, which in turn is producing additional IP that the university can now license. The electronic packaging machine research has motivated our research in opto-mechatronics systems, which takes into account the interaction of mechanical, electrical, and optical subsystems at the early stage of product development to attain unique functionality and performance. The fuel cell manufacturing research has led to our broader focus on fuel cell stack assembly and design for assembly. he was a system engineer at Fisher Controls where he developed a plant-wide coordination control system for pulp and paper plants. From 1985-1988, he was a member of technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he developed new modeling and control algorithms for large space structures and space robots. Since 1988, he has been with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering with a joint appointment in the and has received eleven NASA Tech Brief Awards. His research interest lies in the general area of modeling and control of high performance motion systems, model reduction for complex dynamical systems, and network based control including congestion regulation …