Joost Bolder is group leader of research for the Mechatronics group at ASML, Veldhoven in the Netherlands. Two years ago, he succeeded Wouter Aangenent as chair of the mechatronics working group, housed within and supported by the High Tech Systems Center (HTSC) at TU/e. His research interests include iterative learning control, image processing and mechatronics. He received his MSc (cum laude) in mechanical engineering in 2011 and his PhD in September 2015, both from the Eindhoven University of Technology. So, how does Joost feel about this having fallen into his lap? And what does his think about this era of ASML working on new collaborations with universities?
“In fact,” Joost begins, “I succeeded my former boss who went to a new role within ASML. So, it was partly by design, partly by accident. It was an interesting experience for me initially because I had never actually joined one of the working group meetings before. So that was quite intimidating in a way. It’s a group with a long history and now that I’m two years into the role, it has started to feel good, I can feel the rhythm of the group, the topics, what resonates or what doesn’t.”
20-year horizon
There are actually several mechatronics-themed groups. But, says Joost, “what makes this group different is that we focus on research consortia between industry and academia. So, part of the work we do is discussing the trends, the future trends, what to focus this research on, trying to make a roadmap to get an agreement in place on setting the goals for 20 years ahead. The things we expect we will need to innovate in our field. And then, it’s also about brokering. Many of the public private partnerships, as these are called, are funded with money from research grants and industry. We aim to identify interested industry partners and academic groups, bring them together and through this mechatronics working group, discuss and work out the project proposals to get research started. So, our right of existence is this brokering element, where we really try to initiate and create consortia.”
The bigger picture
The working group looks at both industry needs and the associated fundamental research. “Jeroen Voeten, the scientific director of the HTSC, introduced pitches from academia, and people from industry explain their biggest challenges. We also look at the trends in the world like labor shortages, the continuous increase in system complexity, and the burden that all brings in communication between teams. In addition, we even try to grasp the technological concepts as well as explore the link with education. We try and focus on the bigger challenges. My hope, in the face of the appetite from industry, is that we can use innovations in mechatronics, especially in the methodologies we use to design and make systems. This hugely improves not only individual productivity but also communication between teams and, in doing so, helps us keep our strong position and continue to be a powerhouse in designing complex equipment. The risk is if we don’t address such trends, other parts of the world will catch up, and maybe even become better than us. And then we will notice it in our jobs and lives, everything.”
Open source approach
So, in the light of this, Joost is keen to stimulate collaboration, especially between academic groups.
“That has been quite challenging, for very understandable reasons. Simply how a university operates, is organized. What counts and what doesn’t count. A lot of the problems of today can no longer be solved with one discipline. Many technical problems require cross-disciplinary work to solve, and really make a difference. So that also requires within one research consortium more technical domains to be represented academically and also interact with and integrate with each other. That’s one aspect. Another is trying to make the use of design technologies more seamless. Instead of everyone writing their own code, for instance, let’s make use of open source, common modeling methodologies. It can probably increase efficiency a whole lot if we do these very common things, which are not at all competitive, in an open source way. Students can contribute to a bigger code platform, which is also used in industry. And of course, industry can put their own secret sauce over it, tailored towards the applications they work on. By increasing the collaboration, you can make the transfer from new state-of-the-art tools to industry more seamless and push the boundaries of mechatronics.”
Valuable initiator
“At this point, I would like to thank the High Tech Systems Center for hosting the mechatronics working group, providing the infrastructure, rooms and support. It is really important in initiating research consortia, bringing research groups together to discuss, organizing workshops, securing funding, working towards detailed project proposals, getting industry partners hooked in. At the end of the day, it’s often the academic groups that drive research and they’re often responsible for creating the project proposals for the final agreements in applying for a project when a grant is involved. But the HTSC, I think, is particularly important in the cadence and the speed of communication across academic groups, coordinating bigger programs. We shouldn’t underestimate the amount and value of its work.”