Standing on the dusty pitching mound at a college baseball game, Joshua Vaughan had to make split-second decisions while keeping watch over all the players on the field. Those same instincts are now at play in his position as ORNL’s Manufacturing Robotics and Controls Group Leader. Instead of winning ball games, his group at the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, or MDF, develops robotic systems for a range of applications aimed at revolutionizing American manufacturing.
One of the biggest challenges of this work is defining what the robot needs to do and how it should move. “Determining that involves working with our material scientists and our modeling simulation researchers and coupling that into the robot controller,” he said.
Having robots follow programmed routines works well for large industries, like car assembly lines making millions of vehicles each year. But because the robots must be reprogrammed for every new task, that presents a challenge for manufacturers that produce on a much smaller scale. A goal for Vaughan’s group is to help small and medium-sized businesses adopt automation by making robots smarter and more flexible, and therefore more cost effective.
“We're trying to lower the barrier by making robots more aware of what's happening around them and making the interface easier so it will do what you want,” he said.
Stepping up to the plate
Vaughan grew up in Ettrick, Virginia, in the same house where his father was raised. His family was in the construction business, and he was the first to attend college. He studied physics and math at Hampton-Sydney College with the goal to earn a master’s in engineering, but he turned away from a chance to leapfrog into graduate school because it would have meant finishing a year early.
“I didn't want to do that because I would miss my last spring playing baseball,” he said. He was a starting pitcher throughout his undergraduate years, and he waved off science internships to keep playing every summer. “At the time, I thought baseball is not something I can go back and do. That ended up being a really good choice. I wouldn't trade that time playing baseball for anything.”
At Georgia Tech, Vaughan shifted his focus from baseball to engineering — a transition that came with its own set of challenges. “Some of the smartest people in the world are students there,” he said. “That made me feel like I was behind, but it also provided a North star: that's where I need to get to.”
His advisor, William Singhose, provided a pathway to that goal. Vaughan said their pairing worked well because they had much in common.
“He was a relatively young faculty member at the time, and he’d been a national champion decathlete at MIT,” he said. “We both also came from working-class families.”
Singhose’s mother was a truck driver, inspiring his group’s research on heavy-transport vehicle suspension systems. For his doctorate, Vaughan looked at tower crane controls to prevent payloads from swinging wildly around. He realized then that an aspect of his doctoral work he most enjoyed paralleled his baseball days: coaching.
“I was assigned to be a TA [teaching assistant] to help teach a ‘decisions and designs’ sophomore-level class,” he said. “The course teaches mechanical design through a series of robotics projects and ends in a big robotics contest. I always thought being a coach would be a cool job, and mentoring graduate students is like being a coach. So, I decided I wanted to be a professor.”
He completed his doctoral degree in 2008, amid widespread hiring freezes after the stock market crash. So, he stayed a postdoc for several years, first at Georgia Tech and then at Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he worked on robots that root out land mines and unexploded bombs. Eventually he landed a teaching job at the University of Louisiana Lafayette.
“I taught classes of 100 students and had 20 to 30 students working in my lab every semester,” he said. “The number of lives you impact is tremendous. You’re sitting at dinner, and a former student comes up and says, ‘Hey, you really changed the course of my life — thank you.’”
Take me out to the robotics game
Vaughan arrived at ORNL for a sabbatical from teaching to gain more experience in manufacturing research. When the position of group leader came available, he decided to stay.
“The chance to see your work immediately transitioned out to a company and see the difference it makes — that's a really rare thing in academic research,” he said.
Vaughan’s group has seen a lot of success, from MedUSA, a large-scale metal additive system that won an R&D 100 Award, to using artificial intelligence and other advanced tools for more flexible manufacturing capabilities.
Rather than replacing manufacturing jobs, Vaughan sees robots as assistants, taking risks that people should avoid.
“If a job is dirty, dangerous or dull, we want a robot to do it,” he said. “We’re currently working on a project for spray foam insulation. We want to have a robot spray that foam instead of having a person in that difficult environment doing that dull and dirty job.”
To make this possible, a new workforce will need to be coached, forming teams adept in working hand-in-hand with robotics.
“Our supply chains are pretty fragile in some places,” he said. “We want to address that by making more parts domestically through automation, but then you need to train more people. So, we have a chance to have a big impact on American manufacturing and do some real good.”
The MDF, supported by DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, is a nationwide consortium of collaborators working with ORNL to innovate, inspire and catalyze the transformation of U.S. manufacturing.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science. — Leslie Mullen
