Rockwell Automation, Inc. (NYSE: ROK), the world’s largest company dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation, announced today the grand opening of the Rockwell Experience Center at the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI) in Manchester, N.H. The center recognizes Rockwell’s long-term investment in ARMI, a member-based, nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance the bioeconomy of the United States.

The Rockwell Experience Center will help teach ARMI’s members, including physicians and researchers, how to leverage smart manufacturing to scale regenerative medicine products so they can be delivered to more people faster. The center includes equipment from Rockwell, Air Science, Cytiva, Festo and HID Global. The focal point of the center is a fully automated Cytiva equipment process train integrated with various Rockwell technologies. These include a distributed control system, a manufacturing execution system, and a digital twin.

“The Rockwell Experience Center demonstrates Rockwell’s longstanding support of ARMI and the role smart manufacturing technologies can play to bring regenerative medicine to scale,” said Blake Moret, ARMI board member and chairman and CEO of Rockwell Automation. “ARMI’s work training workers to compete and win in this fast-moving industry is an exciting model for manufacturing and for American competitiveness.”

ARMI is led by inventor Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST Robotics and inventor of the Segway human transporter, the first automatic, wearable insulin pump, portable dialysis machines, a water purifier, an all-terrain electric wheelchair and the DEKA-Luke prosthetic arm. Kamen has said he engaged Moret in ARMI’s earliest days, seeing the potential role automation could play bridging the gap between laboratory science and a commercially viable product.  

“To say that the addition of the Rockwell Experience Center at the ARMI|BioFabUSA facility will be impactful to the area of regenerative medicine would be an understatement,” said Dean Kamen, executive director of ARMI. “By opening this center, we are able to demonstrate the baseline tools by which different types of human tissues and organs can be manufactured at scale. It's life-changing.”