ASME Public Affairs & Outreach Council Conducts Technical Tour, Robotics Discussions

Earlier this month in conjunction with the 2019 ASME Annual Meeting in Orlando, Fla., the Public Affairs & Outreach (PAO) Council continued its six-month analysis of the field of robotics in an effort to identify opportunities for ASME and the broader engineering profession.

In teleconferences ahead of the Annual Meeting, the PAO Sector had solicited an internal review of the robotics landscape from Raj Manchanda, ASME’s business development director for robotics and manufacturing, and external expertise from Dr. Marcia O’Malley, a professor at Rice University and co-chair of the ASME Robotics Public Policy Task Force; and Robert Roney, Jr., an executive with GE Measurement & Control Systems.

With the benefit of these contextualizing perspectives, PAO attendees — including guests from the Early Career Leadership Intern Program to Serve Engineering (ECLIPSE) and the Diversity & Inclusion Strategy Committee — toured the facilities at Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems (MHPS), where the company performs onsite inspection, maintenance and manufacturing of gas and steam turbine components. MHPS robotics capabilities in manufacturing and repair services further informed the Council’s firsthand understanding of opportunities and needs within the turbine industry. Marc Parker, the ECLIPSE intern for PAO, was key in connecting the Council to MHPS through his work with Southern Company.

Onsite at MHPS, attendees then heard from Tj Nguyen, the assistant director of the Southeastern Center of Robotics Education, on ways to promote and advance robotics success among K-12 STEM educators and students. Nguyen’s experience with hands-on games, experiments and competitions highlighted the need to engage students in this space from a young age — a time when the imperative to be versed in this ever-expanding field feels within reach, one Lego block at a time.

The next day, the PAO Council also heard from engineers with Siemens Energy, the third perspective from the “big three” of major players in the gas turbine industry: GE, Mitsubishi Hitachi and Siemens. Mechanical engineers Forrest Ruhge and David Meek focused on topics including the effects of robotics related to worker displacement, training and productivity. They were also interested in PAO conversations regarding the need to further support engineering education and learning/development flexibility toward the student-to-workforce pathway. Paul Garbett, director of engineering at Siemens Energy, represented the Industry Advisory Board at this PAO Council meeting and was integral in recruiting Ruhge and Meek.

With this holistic overview and under the leadership and vision of Kalan Guiley, senior vice president of PAO, the Council sought to actively and deliberatively identify the needs and opportunities within the robotics space. Four groups discussed ASME opportunities for solutions and programmatic mechanisms to create change to that end, before a generative conversation yielded five foci for ensuing PAO recommendations: social impact, workforce development, safety, technology advancement and ethics. As it did with its bioengineering analysis during and leading up to IMECE 2018 in Pittsburgh, the Council will synthesize these findings in a detailed report for ASME leadership.

After six months, PAO can safely state that ASME is uniquely positioned to serve as a leader to and for robotics developers, including hardware modularization and programming standards for applications — especially in manufacturing and inspection/maintenance. There also remain significant opportunities for industry in widely accepted testing protocols for service robots’ effectiveness, reliability and safety. And there are frontiers yet to be explored for robots that operate in extremely hazardous environments, and frontiers in education initiatives in the United States and abroad to make robots commonplace in classrooms and vocational training programs. In short, engineers stand at a precipice: there is real potential to shape the future like never before, informed by ASME’s ethical imperative — its mission — to improve the quality of life for all.

For more information on ASME’s Public Affairs & Outreach Sector and the work of its Council, please contact Aaron Weinerman at WeinermanA@asme.org.