Joining the dots
The Advanced Machinery and Productivity Institute (the AMP Institute) is a new initiative,
currently in its formative stage, that will fi ll a missing hole in the UK’s innovation landscape.
It aims to exploit one of the country’s deep wells of expertise – mechanical machine
building – but marry it to Industry 4.0 technologies to develop machines for future products
and processes. Andrew Allcock has more on the background to this signifi cant development
“The AMP Institute does not seek to return the
current disruption in manufacturing processes to enter
a market where equipment does not yet exist. The AMP
Institute is heralded as an operation that will “ful l a
presently unaddressed, yet critical aspect, of the UK’s
manufacturing innovation infrastructure”.
Those with a long memory may recall the Machine
Tool Industry Research Association (a 1960s’ Wilsongovernment
initiative), which became the Advanced
Manufacturing Technology Research Institute (AMTRI) in
the 1990s before zzling out in the rst decade of the
21st century. To some extent the AMP Institute could be
considered to be an updated model but with a wider
and more creative brief – to establish and develop
economic growth in the design, development and
manufacture of advanced machinery and robotic
systems, with a focus on technology to support the
UK to a nostalgic former state that tries to
compete like-for-like with other competitive
countries that we tend to buy from; instead, we’re
seeking to create the environment where the UK will
lead the world in development and supply of nextgeneration
intelligent and agile machinery,” underlines
Gareth Edwards, National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
He is the organisation’s strategy lead for industrial
digitalisation and works in NPL’s Strategy Directorate,
looking at what the operation needs to be doing to
support industry over the next ve to 20+ years.
He means, for example, that the AMP Institute is
not in the business of recreating the UK’s machine tool
building industry of old but is focused on the machinery
of the future, with the effort believing it can exploit the
Main picture:
Holroyd thread/
compressor-screw
manufacturing
equipment is
globally
competitive and
the company is on
board with the new
initiative, its CEO,
Dr Tony Bannan,
OBE, one of the
effort’s
spokespeople
(see pic, p13)
10 October 2020 | www.machinery.co.uk | MachineryMagazine | @MachineryTweets
/www.machinery.co.uk