“It’s important that we don’t leave out parts of our talent pool,” said Rodney Andrews, director of Kentucky NSF EPSCoR, UK professor of chemical engineering and principal investigator of the project. “(That includes) underrepresented minority students; it may be first-generation students from Appalachia; or it may be students that are at the comprehensive universities who have a strong interest in doing research and contributing to a program like this.”

These efforts will be led by Czarena Crofcheck, a UK biosystems and agricultural engineering professor, who is serving as co-investigator for education and workforce development on the project.

“We have funding opportunities, so we invite proposals for a variety of things, including education outreach events, whether they’re for girls in STEM, or underrepresented minorities at the K-12 level,” Crofcheck said. “We also have funding available to support undergraduates who want to do internships, as well as research experiences that are tied to advanced manufacturing.”

Research for the KAMPERS project will fall into three categories: materials, device configuration and systems. Co-investigators of research include DeBolt, UK C.W. Hammond Professor of Chemistry John Anthony and UofL electrical and computer engineering Professor Dan O. Popa. Popa and his team are working in all three research areas, with a special emphasis on collaborative robotics.

“As we introduce more robots in the manufacturing environment, they have to be more intelligent and they have to be chaperoned and taught by the workers — in a way that doesn’t take jobs but creates more opportunities,” Popa said. “The idea would be for robots and people to work together. Robots to use their strength, for instance, or the precision, and humans to use what they’re better at, which is intelligence, decision-making capabilities and so on. How do they interface with one another? How can the two essentially learn to collaborate and more effectively get something done?”

Anthony’s team has an interest in hybridizing the printed electronic process with the 3D printing process.

“You could incorporate electronics within the structure of whatever it is you’re printing, whether it’s the skin of a drone or a prosthetic arm,” Anthony said. “That would allow you to incorporate things like sensing, logic and communication directly within the structure. And the user can decide exactly what configuration and conformation they want — you just plug and play, the same way you do with 3D printing, but with an electronic component. We can put electronics anywhere this way.”

These examples of advanced manufacturing research will be at the core of the KAMPERS project over the next five years — something Andrews says will place Kentucky at a much higher level of competitiveness.