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MANET: A history of 12 years dedicated to innovation and research
August 10, 2009 by reinaldo
Manet was created by a initiative of the Brazilian Federal government to improve the science and technology synergy and the transfer of innovative proposals between academia and industry. A previous research produce a list of target themes to be explored in this process, and Industrial Automation was one of them, taking as a direct topic Manufacturing Automation.
Years after that, MANET evolve to embrace Automation in a broad sense, without loosing the focus in the manufacturing process. Some rich experiments were developed as project to assist small and medium enterprise, as well as a new reading of previous experiments developed for participants of MANET in projects with multinational and national huge companies and groups. Therefore, MANET divide its manpower between direct projects were most of the processes and methods - that came from the academic work - were implemented and what was called strategic work.
In the strategic work some points are explored such as: i) the real capacity of the industrial suppliers, specially what concerns hitech small and medium companies; ii) the potential of some technology based industrial lines such as special robotic systems and robot retrofitting, and new trends in manufacturing workflow formally described; iii) the introduction of intelligent manufacturing systems and intelligent maintenance systems as a strategy to drop maintenance costs, and the introduction of robotic welding cells; iv) the dissemination of new and established methods by an educational process that covers technical and university students using distance education (a pilot system were launched in a partnership with a telecommunication company). MANET also produced two books in Portuguese about Robotics and Rapid Prototyping, published by Edgard Blucher Editor.
We believe that this kind of work still on demand and the there a lot more to be covered. Thus, the participants of MANET decided to re-organize it again, using the same concepts, that is, to be a virtual network of researchers the can be materialized only in one or several of its research and technology Labs that integrates the net. Besides, we believe that a real integration between research, innovation and industry would come out from a well managed network were there no direct interference from one line in the others. The role of the network management is to integrate and combine mutual interests on all or some of this lines of work instead of deviate or force changes that could be justified only in one of them.
MANET coordnation committee