New Product Research, Design, and Development

New product design is one of the main capabilities customers seek at Foster-Miller. The reason is simple: each project can draw from Foster-Miller’s staff of over 300 engineers and scientists of all major disciplines. New product design and development projects range from product definition through process development and custom equipment design, build and installation.

Watch a video on some of our projects: Watch Video (18MG)

We offer our customers the following:

• Almost 50 years of experience in the field of new product design and development.
• A solid track record of successful, high-profile new product design projects, including the development of equipment to make Velcro®, General Mills’ Gushers® and products such as Becton Dickinson’s insulin injector pen, CECIL® steam generator cleaning robots and LAST® Armor.
• Extensive new product research and development and prototyping capabilities to develop and define new processes required to make new products.
• An experienced engineering staff that has participated in new product design projects of every major industry segment.

Foster-Miller has been developing products for the military for almost 50 years. Among the best known products today are TALON™ robots and LAST® Armor. LAST Armor was originally developed in response to the needs of Operation Desert Storm/Desert Shield in 1991. Since that time, the armor has been used on vehicles and transport planes in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition to the United States, LAST Armor is used by the militaries of nine other countries.

TALON™ - EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) robots are used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan and have already performed more than 30,000 EOD missions. The new, armed version of the robot, TALON™ - SWORDS, was recognized by Time magazine as one of the “most amazing inventions of 2004.” It can be equipped with several different weapons and is then operated remotely by the soldier. In addition, this robot can also be configured for chem/rad sensing.

Medical

Foster-Miller designs and develops custom medical devices. We develop proprietary products from creation of the initial concept through prototype development to final design verification and transition into production. We apply practical, state-of-the-art technology to ensure a breakthrough product.

Foster-Miller integrates design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA), as we also design and build production equipment. Integration of our in-house resources with yours is an important component of assuring that our clients capture all project intelligence.

Core competencies include:

• Catheter design and development.
• Heart valve design.
• Materials development (plastics, polymers, composites, ceramics, phase transition gels).
• Packaging (form-fill-seal, binary packaging).
• Dispensing and delivery systems.
• New product research and development with user and market analysis.
• Industrial design.
• Continuous injection molding.
• Extrusion (conventional, single screw, twin screw, counter-rotating die for LCPs).
• Robotics.
• Automation (high speed, continuous motion, continuous process).
• Automated handling of small, fragile and limp components.
• Automation (flexible, lean, non-synchronous transfer).
• Mechanisms.
• Thermal engineering.
• Valves, seals.
• Fluid mechanics.

Foster-Miller has many years of experience designing commercial and industrial products.

Core capabilities we offer in this area include:

• Materials expertise: a staff of 60 materials/polymer engineers, most with advanced degrees.
• Materials processing expertise: extrusion, molding, film making, adhesives, characterization.
• Packaging and industrial design expertise.
• Extensive software development and programming capabilities at the board and PLC levels.
• Electronics and circuit board development.
• Large mechanical engineering staff.
• Design-for-manufacturing expertise.
• Prototyping, proof-of-principle testing.
• Extensive modeling and simulation capabilities.
• Several design platforms and analytical tools: AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, SolidWorks, Pro/Engineer, Ansys, MathCad, LS-DYNA, others.

High technology is not limited to sophisticated applications or pristine laboratory environments at Foster-Miller. We design and build robust industrial equipment for the construction, maintenance and monitoring of our nation’s critical infrastructure. Our staff is experienced in dealing with the vagaries of these large-scale and challenging environments where robustness is a design imperative.

Past projects have included remotely operated construction equipment, advanced ground stabilization, lightweight, high strength yet low-cost composite material applications, innovative sensors and robotic inspection. Foster-Miller has completed projects in the following critical infrastructure areas involving a number of its technologies and/or core competencies:

• Highway construction/maintenance.
• Oil/gas pipeline construction/maintenance.
• Railroad construction/maintenance.
• Power distribution construction/maintenance.
• Airport runway maintenance.

Foster-Miller plans to play an important role as Homeland Security needs become more defined. The protection of infrastructure will be dependent on many of the technologies that we are currently developing and/or investigating for government and private industry clients.

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