UConn welcomed Kevin Waugh to campus on Thursday, September 5, who presented at the Industry 4.0 and Manufacturing Ingenuity course. The course, funded by CTNext, fosters innovation and entrepreneurship by providing students with exposure to emerging technologies in automation, cyber physical systems, and advanced manufacturing. The course is built upon seminars by invited industrial speakers to introduce cutting-edge technologies and challenges.

UConn invited Kevin Waugh, who has 20 years of experience in digital product development across a variety of industry settings, from small businesses to large OEMs. At Sikorsky Aircraft, he provided support and methodology for digital tools used across the enterprise and collaborative supply chain for multiple aircraft programs.
Waugh received many questions at the end of his presentation entitled, “Generative Design and 3DExperience.” In his talk, Waugh defined 3DExperience, which, in short, are applications that enable industries, and spoke about product life cycle management and digital thread. Then, he discussed the importance of composites and methods of composite manufacturing. Later, he went into detail about generative design, an iterative process that involves a program that will generate a certain number of outputs that meet certain constraints, which the designer fine tunes in order to reduce or augment the number of outputs to choose from.

This week, Dr. Ashwin Dani will be the seminar speaker. Dani is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UConn. His presentation will focus on the role of robotics and automation in Industry 4.0.