3/8/2024 Riya Agrawal
Written by Riya Agrawal
MechSE has welcomed Teaching Assistant Professor Mickey Clemon. He recently returned to the U.S. from the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, where among other academic duties, he was working to automate wool harvesting on farms.
Clemon completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Kansas and received his MS in 2013 and PhD in 2017 from the University of California at Berkeley, all in mechanical engineering. His graduate studies focused on sustainable manufacturing techniques to understand how the material state life cycle impacts waste generation while designing for additive manufacturing (AM).
Before, in between, and after his graduate studies, Clemon worked at Sandia National Laboratories, where he worked to eliminate recovered chemical weapons. “I made industrial machinery designs for highly specialized environments,” he said. His focus on traditional mechanical engineering, such as working with high-pressure systems and impulsive loading, led him to develop a strong industrial machinery design skillset.
Although he is not currently teaching, he is likely to teach in the design sequence (e.g., ME 270, ME 370, ME 371, ME 470) or Special Topics (ME 498) in the fall. He has a lot of ideas for new projects for these courses, such as simple robotic arm design. The topics in these courses also align with his research, and he plans to explore them in depth with his collaborators. “I have, at my previous institution, designed an additive manufacturing course, so I would love to bring some of that here,” he said.
The focus of his academic research has been two-fold: first, additive manufacturing and learning how to control, monitor, and perform material state estimation during 3D printing. He has also worked with waste management and life cycle impact, performing triple bottom line analysis of the production process to answer questions such as how much waste is generated, where waste goes, and how much energy is used.
More recently, Clemon worked on developing a new system for AM that involved multiple robots collaborating to print objects together. When these robots have highly overlapping workspaces, they need an efficient framework for collaborating. This isn’t as common when printing larger items, as one can move the robots far from each other.
“This has an interesting future now that we have the framework for them to collaborate, which is working very, very well,” he said. “The future is adding multiple-materials and assembly tasks with humans, so that would merge into the realm of cobotic manufacturing, where humans and robots are interacting together.”
Regarding his work at UTS in Australia, Clemon noted that the wool industry is now trying to move toward automating the harvesting and processing of wool. He said, ''The need for this project stemmed from the fact that shearing sheep is very physically taxing.” This leads to high shearing costs and a low number of workers available for such jobs. He and his team continue to explore this area.
Clemon is currently looking to collaborate with undergraduate and graduate students at Illinois. He has many ideas for research topics including collaborative robotic 3D printer design, robotic arm design, making low-cost small-scale mechanical testing equipment, and understanding and identifying material constraints that can be used for optimizing manufacturing processes. He is also open to working with industry partners, with the overall goal of collaborating with people who want to make a positive impact on the world.
“I really enjoy working with industry and tackling their challenges,” he explained, noting that doing so for the automation of wool harvesting provided him valuable experience.
“One thing that's very clear to me is that the sustainability improvement metrics that we need to achieve are not a technological solution,” he added. “We have lots of technology. What we don't have is adoption, translation, understanding, education, or policy, which makes it very hard to adopt the technology that we already have. I think there's a very important and big area where I can help within the education outreach piece.”
Throughout his career, Clemon has applied his sustainability manufacturing knowledge to AM and wants to continue doing so in the long run. “I like to make cool machines, and I’m passionate about sustainable manufacturing,” he said.