This project was completed during my junior year for the ‘Automation and Manufacturing Methods’ course at Boston University. The aim of the project was to create a product that could be manufactured in the Boston University Automated Design and Manufacturing Laboratory (ADML) using only two parts. This had to be done by implementing a variety of manufacturing strategies, including computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) control, scheduling through routing diagrams and work-in-progress, throughput, and cycle analysis, and implementation of lean principles.

Our two-person group decided to make a computer-mounted smartphone stand that would allow for users to use their phone alongside their computer. We decided on this product as having a conveniently-placed device that could be used as a second monitor would be quite useful in work-from-home situations, and current alternatives seemed to be lacking in certain ways such as durability.

This project was really useful in my development as an engineer as it allowed me to design a product to be manufactured in a fully automated manner. It forced me to think of my product in terms of manufacturability rather than just thinking about its purpose, which definitely affected the way our team designed our parts - we sought to decrease the processing time as much as possible, thus simplifying our geometry and using stock pieces that were quite close to the final product. We made multiple prototypes and redesigned our parts multiple times in order to make them more easily manufactured and assembled in an automated setting, adding components such as chamfers in order to reduce the possibility of error by the robotic arms used. In addition to this, the technical aspects such as scheduling, lean principles, and process analysis really gave me a lot of tools to further assess automated manufacturing processes in terms of their bottleneck, efficiency, and statistical control.