The Manufacturing Innovation Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is an interdisciplinary research center located in the George M. Low Center for Industrial Innovation on Rensselaer's Troy, New York campus.
MIC partners and collaborates with:
- Industrial clients, including startup ventures
- Researchers and research centers at Rensselaer and other Universities
- State and Federal Government agencies such as NYSTAR, NYSERDA, NSF, NIST, DOE, AFOSR, ARO, DARPA and ONR
Our facilities include high-bay space with 10-ton lift capacity housing a custom, high-precision, 40-ton press with heated tooling, a laser material processing testbed and two PLA800 fuel cell test stands. An additional 2,400 ft2 of laboratory space is dedicated to manufacturing research that includes an Instron 5848 microtester with an environmental chamber, a stack assembly testbed consisting of two Adept SCARA robots and associated tool changers and tooling, a Hudson Machinery die cutting press, a Branson X2000 ultrasonic welder and a Matrix MicroVu precision measuring system.
MIC also has a number of laboratories on the 8th floor of CII. The dual-robot arm laboratory houses Motoman SDA10 15-dof dual arm system with ATI force/torque sensors, Robotiq 3-finger hands, and Kinect user interface, two refurbished PUMA 560 robot arms on custom platforms (total 18 coordinated dof) controlled by a MIC-designed distributed control system, and multiple iRobot CREATS with CMUCams and gumstix processors. Mitsubishi RV-1A rail mounted robot designed for life science automation. Our optomechatronics laboratories include a Zygo NewView 7200 Optical Profiler, multiple deformable mirrors, TI DMD development system, a custom-built Adaptive Optical Scanning Microscope, four vibration isolated optical tables, wavefront sensors, steering mirrors, HeNe and IR lasers, Zemax optical design software and a wide array of optical and optomechatronic components. The microassembly laboratory houses a multi-probe micromanipulation system driven by coarse-fine stages with multiple camera feedback operated under MIC developed Robot Raconteur distributed control system.