Grants / National Science Foundation / U.S. National Science Foundation

NSF PD-16-018Y: Cybermanufacturing Systems

Closed Closed Opportunity NSF PD-16-018Y ☆ Save

This grant is closed. A newer notice from the same program is open now: Major Research Instrumentation Program: (MRI) (NSF 27-500). Status: Closes January 29, 2027 (83 days left). It is in our archive of U.S. National Science Foundation notices from 2025.

• Award ceiling$600,000
• Award floor$10,000
• Total funding$3.0 million
• Expected awards10
• Cost sharingNot required
• Funding typeGrant

Key dates

Who can apply

This opportunity was open to any type of organization.

• Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled "Additional Information on Eligibility"

More grants for nonprofits, colleges and universities, state and local governments, tribes, small businesses, businesses, individuals.

Is this a realistic fit?

• Past Engineering awards averaged $385,774; this notice allows up to $600,000 per award.
• Most of the program's money (89% over five years) went to colleges and universities.
• No cost sharing or match is required.

What the grant funds

The Cybermanufacturing Systems (CM) Program supports fundamental research to enable the evolution of a wide range of network-accessed manufacturing services that: employ applications (or “apps”) that reside in the “cloud” and plug into an expansible, interactive architecture; are broadly accessible, guarantee reliable execution and have capabilities that are transparent to users; and are accessible at low cost to innovators and entrepreneurs, including both users and providers. Current manufacturing software applications are predominantly large, manufacturer-centric, general-purpose programs with theuniversal applicability needed to justify their development, marketing and acquisition costs. They usuallyhave broad capabilities, but are cumbersome to learn and often require expert intervention. There is an opportunity for researchers to pursue research and educational efforts to accelerate the creation of an interoperating, cross-process manufacturing service layer that enables the rapid, bottom-up transformation of access to manufacturing services. Such a service layer can allow creative entrepreneurs and companies to both furnish and access manufacturing apps that span the full spectrum from ideation to physical realization, giving rise to an era of “cybermanufacturing.” The cybermanufacturing service layer differs from existing Internet services in that it needs an architecture that can incrementally incorporate and organize the rich and deep semantic elements of manufacturing knowledge, requiring an almost unlimited capacity to expand the range and depth of content contributed in the form of partitioned, but interoperating, manufacturing applications. Such efforts are well-suited to incubation in universities, where potential service layer architectures and application modules can be prototyped at low cost, used in coursework and tested by students and faculty. Of particular interest is the exploration of the tradeoffs between generality and tractability in algorithmic representations of manufacturing knowledge. In the classic example, the automation of integrated circuit manufacturing depends on restricting device design options to those that can be produced with 100% reliability by a standardized set of manufacturing processes. As a result, the problem of compiling manufacturing instructions is made tractable by limiting available design options to those that can be manufactured using proven methods.

Category: Science and Technology and other Research and Development.

Applying now

This notice no longer takes applications. Apply under the newer notice, NSF 27-500, which is open now.

The notice on Grants.gov keeps its full text and attachments, which is useful for planning a resubmission.