Collaborative Research: VINES: Track 1: FACTORY-AI: AI-Native Industrial IoT Networks for Smart Manufacturing

FACTORY-AI aims at transforming future factories by making them smarter, safer, and more responsive. Machines, sensors, robots, and cameras exist in future factories, and they need to share information quickly, make optimal decisions, and keep working even when the wireless signals are crowded or the conditions in the environment change. FACTORY-AI provides those capabilities by designing intelligent models that support future factories to sense what is happening, understand what needs attention, and adjust communication and computing resources in real time. These models are further tested in a large experimental infrastructure, the PROTON testbed, to evaluate their operation and improve their performance. FACTORY-AI’s result is a factory system that can better support robot coordination, machine monitoring, product inspection, and safer automated operations. The intellectual merit of FACTORY-AI focuses on a unified framework for integrated sensing, communication, and computing. FACTORY-AI is a collaborative project among Arizona State University and Clemson University and consists of three tightly linked thrusts. Thrust 1 transforms the multimodal sensing streams into semantic control tokens through a Large Language Model that captures the operational intent of the smart factory by establishing a perception-learning-reflex loop. Thrust 2 supports the Open Radio Access Network edge intelligence that consumes those tokens to generate workloads that optimize the communication and computing within the overall system. Thrust 3 designs and manages the 3D Heterogeneous-Integrated Compute-in-Memory compute infrastructure that executes these workloads efficiently. The FACTORY-AI solution is tested in the PROTON testbed, a 2,000 wireless nodes Industrial Internet of Things testbed at Arizona State University, complemented by the NSF-funded DISCOVER platform. The broader impacts include strengthening United States leadership in artificial intelligence enabled manufacturing, industrial wireless systems, and resilient cyber physical infrastructure. FACTORY-AI benefits manufacturing, logistics, energy, mining, agriculture, autonomous mobility, smart grid monitoring, and disaster response, where fast sensing and reliable control are critical. Workforce development will be performed during the execution of the project, engaging undergraduate and graduate students in research activities. Industry engagement is also planned, along with contributions to standards development, which will help move the resulting technologies toward practical use in the fifth-generation smart factories and related industrial systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.