The Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute has grown to more than 500 member organizations, bringing industrial companies, defense contractors, universities, technical colleges, startups and government institutions into a consortium focused on robotics, physical AI and factory automation.
ARM, founded in 2017 as part of the Manufacturing USA network, says its members have already taken part in hundreds of technology projects. The institute’s model combines collaboration, funding and access to infrastructure for organizations developing automation technologies that may be difficult to pursue independently.
Our consortium is the foundation of the institute and an integral part of our mission.
Jorgen Pedersen, CEO, ARM Institute
Shipbuilding projects target welding and inspection
The institute’s work extends to naval manufacturing through US Navy funding announced in October for shipbuilding-focused projects. The effort targets manufacturing tasks where real-time robotic sensing and local AI processing could help detect or correct problems before they become costly downstream defects.
- Adaptive welding of thick structures, using locally processed AI to correct for variations in real time.
- Inspection of parts made through material-deposition manufacturing, with the aim of finding defects during production rather than after completion.
Other ARM projects cover mobile robots, human-robot collaboration, autonomous route planning and systems designed to be rapidly reconfigured for different tasks. Together, they reflect a push to put AI directly into industrial machines and robots rather than treating it solely as a cloud-based software layer.
The institute will hold its next annual meeting in Pittsburgh from November 17 to 19, 2026, bringing robotics, AI and advanced-manufacturing projects together as manufacturers look for deployable automation systems.
