The task that baffles students in the Manufacturing, Planning and Control class is something that a five-year-old can easily do: snap two Legos together.
One might think that the state-of-the-art robots in the Omron Advanced Automation Lab would do it at least as easily as a human toddler. It turns out, however, that the process of making Lego structures is less than intuitive for a robot.
“What we find is that Legos are awesome for this class because robots struggle with them,” says Jeffrey Brand, instructor of practice in management. “They have a lot of wiggle to them. Students have to be able to constrain the problem and teach the robot to do something that comes instinctively to humans.”
The process of teaching robots is a collaborative effort between supply chain management and engineering programs. Students in the class learn advanced techniques for demand management, capacity requirements planning and lean manufacturing in O’Brien Hall, then walk across the street to Engineering Hall to bring those lessons to life.
Lesson number one for success in this class: get used to failure.
We call ourselves failure assistants instead of teaching assistants. We’re not here to teach. We’re here to try.
Ellie O’Rourke, senior mechanical engineering student
The class is frustrating by design. Brand and Voglewede, who co-teach the course, wanted the syllabus to mirror how problem-solving would work on a factory floor. While “automation” may imply humans are no longer necessary, robots frequently break, and production processes are held up for myriad reasons. The best problem-solvers in these situations often make the best supply chain professionals.
“We call ourselves failure assistants instead of teaching assistants,” says Ellie O’Rourke, a senior mechanical engineering student who assists students in the OMRON Lab. “We’re not here to teach. We’re here to try. We’re here to do trial and error and attempt as many things as possible, because that’s when you learn the most.”
“It’s valuable when students are learning on their own and we’re not doing it for them,” adds Dr. Phil Voglewede, associate department chair and professor of mechanical engineering.
Damian Lassak, a junior triple major in supply chain management, marketing and theology, spends hours coding the robot to follow his commands. His group started with the most obvious solution: asking the robot to place one block on top of the other. The machine took the most direct route to fulfilling the request, moving its arms in a diagonal path from point A to point B, which failed to snap the bricks together.
That’s how Lassak learned that to control the robot, he needed to think like the robot.
“Sometimes you have to think outside the box with these things,” Lassak says. “Maybe you have to designate a point in between A and B so it doesn’t interact with any of the other pieces. And if it’s a millimeter off, it may not click in the way you intend it to.”
Marquette has a strong reputation for supply chain education: its undergraduate program was recently ranked among the nation’s 10 best by consulting firm Gartner Inc. In 2023, 93 percent of graduating seniors were either employed or in graduate school within six months of Commencement.
Applied learning experiences like the ones in Manufacturing, Planning and Control go a long way toward preparing students for industry. However, with the supply chain world becoming more cross-functional every day, merely learning by doing isn’t enough — graduates must understand the functions of their partners’ jobs in addition to their own. Brand hopes students walk away with that concept ingrained.
“A lot of times, our students aren’t aware of the significance of engineering to their work until they actually see it, then everything starts to click,” Brand says. “The College of Engineering has been incredible to work with. I have nothing but the highest regard for the way this has been executed on their end.”
Amid all these failures is a rigorous yet rewarding learning process, one that always leads to a big payoff: the moment where a group finally gets their robot to join the Legos into place.
“Once you finally get the code right so that the robot gets it every single time, the feeling of achievement you get from that is the greatest thing in the world,” Lassak says.
