Department of Mechanical Engineering

Alumnus - Brian Swanson

 

Brian Swanson, BSME’99, MSME’00
Manufacturing Engineer, John Deere
Waterloo, Iowa

What led you to major in ME?
Since I was young, I have always been fascinated with robots. My advisor at ISU orientation suggested ME as a field that would be applicable to robotics. I tried to tailor my tech electives to courses that applied to robotics, and I also took several computer science courses.

Why did you decide to get an MS degree?
Robotics just wasn’t an area of focus for a general ME bachelor’s degree. I only had some basic theoretical background and very little practical experience. When I graduated there were few robotic positions available, and those that were required more robotics knowledge and experience than I had. So I went to graduate school.

What has been your career path at John Deere?
I started in the Product Engineering Center in the Electro-Hydraulics Control Systems Group. It was a really interesting group but made up entirely of people with advanced degrees who had far more experience than me, so I couldn’t get any of the interesting projects. I came out to the factory in 2003 as a maintenance engineer. Four months later I was transferred to the supervisor/production engineer position on the robotic weld line that produces cab frames. I was involved with resolving production problems and creating designs to improve quality and decrease downtime. The precision of robots can create problems because they’re set up to weld in exactly the same spot each time. Since the parts have variations, we have to make adjustments so the weld will be in the right place.

I’m still supporting the line when needed, but now I’m focusing more on other projects. Currently I’m assisting in the set-up of several new robotic weld cells and also designing and setting up a robotic adhesive application cell. Pretty much all of my projects have the same theme: programming robots and troubleshooting work cells.

What were some of the highlights of your education?
Without a doubt the most fun, interesting, and challenging time I had was spent during graduate school working in the Laboratory for Advanced Robotics and Computer Control for Dr. Greg Luecke. We put in a lot of hours and a lot of late nights in the lab, but I had a lot of fun doing it.

The only drawback was that we were 10 years ahead of our time. The technology currently used in the manufacturing environment lags significantly behind the research that we were conducting in the lab.

What do you think the future holds for robotics?
In general, robotics isn’t as prevalent in manufacturing as you might expect. Overhead goes down and productivity goes up when using robots, but the initial investment is high. As a result, companies aren’t implementing them as much as they could. With cutting-edge research such as that happening at Iowa State, I hope robotics will become a routine part of manufacturing.

---