New Factory of the Future 2050

Friday, 13, November, 2015

During our last visit in Sheffield we had the pleasure to visit the construction area of the new Factory of the Future 2050.

From the first design rendering till today a lot of work has been done and the facility is almost ready for the opening, expected for the first half of 2016.

Factory 2050 will be the UK’s first fully reconfigurable assembly and component manufacturing facility for collaborative research, capable of rapidly switching production between different high-value components and one-off parts.

The creation of the new facility is supported by a £10 million

Prof. Keith Ridgway, Founder of AMRC is explaining the future development of the Advanced Manufacturing Park grant from the Research Partnership Investment Fund, managed by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

AMRC Factory 2050 will combine technologies including advanced robotics, flexible automation, unmanned workspace, off-line programming in virtual environments linked to plug-and-play robotics, 3D printing from flexible automated systems, man-machine interfaces, and new programming and training tools. The building will have an area of around 6,730 sq m, and will be constructed largely from glass, to showcase the advanced manufacturing technologies being developed within. It will house around 75 AMRC staff plus visiting staff from our partner companies.

Factory 2050 aims to anchor a new wave of advanced manufacturing development on the Sheffield Business Park, around half a mile from the fantastic Advanced Manufacturing Park which is now reaching the limits of its available land.