Improving Manufacturing with Innovative AI Solutions
Ajith Srikanth, MS’26, advanced & intelligent manufacturing, at his co-op with Van Dyk Recycling Solutions, worked on developing and designing innovative AI solutions to improve the manufacturing process.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cody Mello-Klein. Main photo: For his Northeastern University co-op, Ajith Srikanth spent eight months designing innovative AI solutions for Van Dyk Recycling Solutions. Photo by Van DYK Recycling Solutions.
He tinkered with toys as a child, now he’s revolutionizing manufacturing with AI
Most children will break their toys. At 4 years old, Ajith Srikanth wanted to fix his.
When he broke a small toy bicycle he had received, Srikanth was nervous to tell his parents. Scared that he might not get another, he resolved to repair it. With a little glue, he set the broken wheel and handlebars right. He got his toy back and a valuable lesson.
“My mom encouraged me to think like this: If you break stuff, try fixing it,” said Srikanth, now an engineering master’s degree student at Northeastern University working in advanced and intelligent manufacturing. “Then you will at least know the value of the effort that you put in, and in the process of fixing it you learn something. … After a failure, it’s not really a failure for me. I try to think of that failure as my lesson for the next goal or ambition that is going to come.”
Srikanth now fixes much more complicated things than a toy bicycle and uses much more advanced tools than glue. He’s using AI to revolutionize an industry that underlies almost every area of life: manufacturing. As a co-op at Van Dyk Recycling Solutions, a leading design, consulting and equipment provider for recycling facilities, Srikanth is pushing AI, and himself, into a new frontier.
“I have put my leg into a lot of boats, but the learning that I got and the exposure that I got from doing something like this is just phenomenal for me,” Srikanth said. “I just saw manufacturing as this one thing. Now I see manufacturing with AI, with recycling, with sustainability and it’s a lot more big picture.”
At Northeastern, Srikanth had designed a chatbot that would troubleshoot solutions that engineers encounter in manufacturing, like a broken sensor, conveyor belt or laser marking machine. That project earned him his co-op at Van Dyk, which wanted a similar chatbot for its own engineers.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News