Ohio State University Center for Design & Manufacturing Excellence (CDME)

The Ohio State University's Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence (CDME) works with companies and researchers to translate new technologies into real-world, market-ready manufactured products. These projects give student employees at CDME hands-on experience integrating new technology while providing our customers the workforce advantage necessary to compete in a global marketplace. The center executes this innovative approach to technology translation and workforce development while shaping the national conversation on advanced manufacturing innovation. CDME partners with more than 150 companies and has completed over 520 applied engineering projects. Projects are executed in a 45,000 square-foot ITAR compliant manufacturing facility on The Ohio State University's West Campus. In all, the center houses more than $20 million in industrial-scale equipment and employs two dozen full-time technical staff. Full-time staff members execute projects while mentoring and advising CDME student employees. At CDME, student employees work in an industrial environment that matches their experience after graduation. They're programming robotic systems, developing medical devices, leveraging 3D printing techniques, and more. You can't fake real – and students employed by CDME are working on real customer projects. More than 350 undergraduate students have been impacted to date. These student employees represent a diverse selection of academic concentrations, representing over 40 majors and five colleges. CDME has seven divisions: Additive Manufacturing, Artificially Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (AIMS), Engineering and Testing Services, Industrial Cybersecurity, Materials and Process, Medical Modeling, Materials, and Manufacturing (M4), and Program Management. The AIMS Lab is where industry professionals and academia come together to study and develop manufacturing systems that work with, and are controlled by, different types of artificial intelligence. Formed in 2019, the AIMS Lab provides an industry-relevant venue to develop and optimize novel, hybridized manufacturing processes, design and test custom sensors and controls, study and advance human-robot interaction, benchmark cognitive computing frameworks, and define security and ethics based protocols. In the AIMS Lab, researchers are leveraging the robustness of proprietary automation systems with the flexibility of open-source technologies to support the next generation of manufacturing. The AIMS Lab offers a full research solution for manufacturers by leveraging model-based simulations, in-house robotic systems, machine vision capabilities, and access to computational processing. Through partnering with the ROS (Robot Operating System) Industrial Consortium, the AIMS Lab has accelerated the ability to deploy technologies into reality. As a proponent of the open-source manufacturing movement, many of the tools and capabilities of the AIMS Lab are openly published on its Github page. As a division of CDME, the AIMS Lab can perform the following advanced manufacturing operations: welding, forming, joining, injection molding, die casting, waterjet and laser cutting, mechanical and hydroforming pressing, electrical assembly, and most additive manufacturing methods. Additionally, engineers can provide characterization capabilities such as corrosion analysis, mechanical behavior, optical emission spectrometry, and other inspection capabilities. These offerings may supplement any fundamental or applied research project.