Fundamental steps toward next-generation intelligent automatic process in a faster and cost-effective chain for processing optical surfaces

In the context of industry 4.0, building data clouds in manufacturing technologies is the fundamental step to approach intelligent automatic process. This new technology has proved to efficiently and effectively monitor five important responses (removal rate, texture, surface accuracy, edge-profiles and mid-spatial frequencies) with more than 95% repeatability in real time. This faster and inexpensive process can serve for the nowadays high-quality segmented telescopes. We illustrate the underlying problem by reference to a case-study – the challenge of an average manufacturing rate of 11.4 segments per month for the 39.3m optical/infrared European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) project.