Ferreira group kicking off a revolution in computer numerical control for manufacturing
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Six of the seven authors accept their NAMRC Outstanding Paper award on June 17, 2026. At the far left and far right are conference officials Xun Xu and Brett Conner. Holding the plaques are (left to right) authors Shivam Garg, Aryan Shroff, Ricardo Toro, Jorge E. Correa, Shiv G. Kapoor, and Placid M. Ferreira. Co-author Liang Tung Chen was not present.
view moreCredit: The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
At times, it might seem like the computing technologies that pervade the modern world are continually making a whirlwind of dizzying advances. But that isn’t always the case. Computer automation has long played a critical role in manufacturing, notably including the use of computer numerical control (CNC) to control machine tools. Yet despite the importance of CNC to industry, the fundamental approach underlying its use has remained unchanged for decades.
Placid Ferreira’s research group is now shaking up that status quo in a big way. They’ve introduced the Cloud-Direct NC (C-DNC) framework, which represents a fundamental rethinking of how machine control is done. The paper describing the framework just won a NAMRC Outstanding Paper in the Journal of Manufacturing Systems award, which was presented to the team at the 54th North American Manufacturing Research Conference (NAMRC).
In addition, through a new venture called ToolBit, Ferreira’s students Shivam Garg and Aryan Shroff are in the process of commercializing one application of the framework: a technology they call Numerical Control as a Service (NCaaS). That effort has already won another two awards.
What makes C-DNC so novel?
Ferreira, who is the Tungchao Julia Lu Professor in mechanical science & engineering and an affiliate of the Holonyak Micro & Nanotechnology Laboratory and the Coordinated Science Laboratory, explained that until now, there has been a dichotomy between hardware and software.
“On one side, in manufacturing, you have the machines, and on the other side, you have software, and there’s always been a sort of barrier between the two,” he said. “Sometimes, that barrier has been justified, as it’s good for security and so forth. But in general it fragments the flow of information. It introduces various kinds of breaks in the flow of information where somebody has to manually translate the file, or do something to a file to get a program to run on the machine.”
Ferreira said the team asked themselves a fundamental question: knowing what we know today in terms of cloud computing, high-bandwidth communications, emerging AI applications, affordable sensing options, and so on, would we still want to use the same old approach for CNC? Or would we do something different?
“We came to the conclusion that one has to have a much more sort of integrated view of how things are done, rather than ‘this is done in software outside the machine; this is done on the machine.’ And we developed and implemented an architecture which seamlessly... recruits cloud resources, it recruits client resources, it recruits embedded systems resources, and integrates them together to define a really seamless flow of information.”
Ferreira said the ultimate result will be that machines gain “the potential to be much smarter.”
“[A machine] can react to what is happening better,” he said. “It can learn from what it previously did more efficiently so it doesn’t do the same thing, it can compensate for its errors. It can become much, much more sensitive and perceptive with respect to its environment... And then by connecting it to client and cloud resources, it can analyze these data much more easily that it’s collecting. It can store and manage and curate this information much more easily. And it can access web resources to do learning algorithms and online learning. So you can have a much, much better integrated stack.”
Students Garg and Shroff have been strategizing about how to commercialize aspects of C-DNC. In Spring 2026, they took the Landuyt Center for Entrepreneurship’s course TE 598, Accelerating Deep Tech Enterprises, and used it as a springboard for developing plans.
Shroff explained that the C-DNC framework is an umbrella that implies a wide range of different sub-technologies. The piece that he and Garg are starting with, which they call ToolBit, is “the hardware device that essentially does the communication” between a company’s manufacturing machines and the C-DNC cloud architecture.
Shroff said that TE 598 has two sides: in part it’s a traditional class in which students learn about marketing and other business principles, but it’s also a pitching competition with judges brought in from all over the U.S. “It’s kind of a hybrid combination of a class and a startup accelerator,” he said.
ToolBit ended up winning the $5,000 third-place prize in the TE 598 competition. Earlier in the semester, the team also won an EnterpriseWorks Student Startup Tenancy Prize after Garg and Shroff presented the work at the Landuyt Center’s 2026 Cozad Demo Day. That prize includes access to co-working and conference spaces in EnterpriseWorks, the startup incubator at the University of Illinois Research Park.
Both awards indicate that the competitions’ judges were convinced that ToolBit has high potential for success.
Garg intends to waste no time in pursuing that success after he graduates with his M.S. this August. He is already working hard on customer discovery, networking with people who work and invest in the manufacturing domain to gain a deep understanding of what they see as problems. “These are the domains that I really want to understand right now. And then I’ll proceed to work on problem-solving on those problems,” he said.
Team member Jorge E. Correa, a teaching assistant professor in mechanical science & engineering, reflected, “I think this is the first time that the underlying basis of the numerical control technology, which is the backbone of our automation... has been given real thought in the past 30 or 40 years, and we’re proposing a new way of rearranging it that can have a lot of benefits... This is the first time that a team has thought about it deeply and proposed a new way of architecting it that can bring real advantages to CNC and automation.”
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Affiliations in The Grainger College of Engineering:
Liang Tung Chen graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering in December 2025.
Jorge E. Correa is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science & Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, where he previously earned an M.S. (2015) and Ph.D. (2017).
Placid Ferreira is the Tungchao Julia Lu Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science & Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering. He is also affiliated with the Holonyak Micro & Nanotechnology Laboratory (HMNTL) and the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) in The Grainger College of Engineering. He is also the director of the Center for Networked Intelligent Components and Environments (C-NICE) in CSL.
Shivam Garg is set to graduate with an M.S. in the Department of Mechanical Science & Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering in August 2026.
Shiv Kapoor is Grayce Wicall Gauthier Chair Emeritus and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mechanical Science & Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering.
Aryan Shroff is pursuing an M.S. in the Department of Mechanical Science & Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering.
Ricardo Toro is a Research Engineer in the Coordinated Science Laboratory and an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Science & Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering.
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