From the basement of MIT Building 35 to Monterrey, Mexico, and now beyond. Such is the journey of FrED, a low-cost, stationary (Fr)(E)(D) fiber extrusion device designed and assembled by students at the MIT Education Factory.
This factory is changing the way manufacturing is taught, replacing textbook learning with hands-on experience in a space where tinkering and a constant flow of information are encouraged. Thanks to a collaboration between MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey (Tec), managed by MIT.nano, FrED has been refined in dozens of master’s theses and undergraduate research stays. It is used to study production systems in academic and professional courses and in FrED factories, first established at MIT and now at Tec campuses in Monterrey and Mexico.
“What does it mean to bring the factory closer to the student?” asked Brian W. Anthony, deputy director of MIT.nano and principal scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE), during the second annual FrED Summit in Mexico. “We have FrED as a process that makes the fiber, we also have an FrED factory, which is an education and practice factory where we make the real product. It’s not just a learning factory where we tear the product when we’re done. We’re really sending FrED to our online students, educators at MIT and Tec, and soon to new partners around the world.”
Designed from the ground up to scale multi-node communities, FrED and the FrED factory have created a booming collaborative ecosystem for current and future manufacturing engineers. The next step is the global expansion of this ecosystem. Announced at the FrED Summit by Tec Professor Pedro Ponce Cruz, the modern FrED plant on the Tec Saltillo campus will open in the next academic year. The team then plans to expand to other campuses in the United States and Mexico.
“Together, we are helping to build a global pipeline of engineering talent,” says Adriana Vargas Martinez, executive director of research strategy at Tec. “Thanks to the FrED and FrED factories initiative, nearly 500 students have already been trained in advanced manufacturing automation, moving from Tec classrooms to research labs and projects in collaboration with MIT.”
Discussing the research impact of FrED and the FrED factory, he notes 25 publications and 7 articles in preparation. “International mobility was also an important dimension of this partnership,” he says.
Moving towards newfangled topics related to deep technology
FrED’s expansion comes as manufacturing at MIT and across the industry moves toward intelligent manufacturing, or Industry 4.0, integrating automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence. One of MIT’s strategic priorities is the MIT Fresh Manufacturing Initiative (INM), is working to support modern manufacturing research, develop modern courses and employee training, and build collaborative facilities to pilot production lines and immersive manufacturing experiences. FrED and the FrED factory are already designed to support these efforts, and on an international scale.
“I think FrED and the FrED factory really solve at least one problem: how do we provide real, physically meaningful physical context and data at the manufacturing level, manufacturing-level problems in academia that can be directly transferred to the knowledge needed on the factory floor,” Anthony says. He adds that it is complex to obtain data from a real factory; what FrED offers is a physical context crossed with data science, providing an open platform and open data for learning and experimentation.
FrED naturally generates the multimodal data required for digital twins, analytics, and AI-driven process improvement, turning the abstract integration of AI and manufacturing into practical practice. The next set of research goals at the FrED factory will focus on developing a realistic and interactive digital twin of the factory, an immersive technology for collaborative learning that integrates agent-based controllers. These will include modern downstream manufacturing processes and machines using FrED fiber as input – all with the aim of improving intelligent manufacturing education.
Students from MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey will work on these goals as part of the FrED research stay at the factory. In this program, Tec students study at MIT to work side by side with MIT students – not observing, but fully integrating with the research team. Students then take what they learn to Mexico to improve FrED factories at their home institution.
“Beyond the technical side, FrED provided me with memories, friendships, and much more confidence than I thought I would,” says Naomi Najera, an undergraduate Tec student who completed a research internship at MIT in 2025. “It also gave me the space to make mistakes and learn from them. And to realize how much I could accomplish with my team. The human side of this project really changed my entire experience.”
A recent result of this exchange, announced June 23 by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), a paper titled “Hands-On Predictive Maintenance Kit for Manufacturing Education: An Accessible Experiential Learning Approach,” written by Tec and MIT students, received the 2026 ASEE Manufacturing Division Best Paper Award.
Transferring classroom learning to factory operations
On the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, passersby can peer into the basement of Building 35 and see the constant flow of activity, materials and knowledge at the MIT FrED plant. In Mexico, seven cohorts of students over four years designed a custom version of FrED and built and operated an automated FrED factory production line. Indeed, FrED has restructured the way Tec teaches mechatronics and manufacturing systems. “This collaboration integrates research directly into education,” says Vargas Martinez, “connecting learning factories and our manufacturing environments with student-centered research.”
Tec students’ enthusiasm led to the launch of an Undergraduate Research Opportunities program in Mexico (BOX: Factory Research for All in Mechatronics Education), in which first-year students work alongside graduate students in a FrED factory.
“Joining FrED as a first-semester university student was an incredible opportunity for me to gain hands-on experience on real-world projects in areas such as coding, manufacturing and robotics,” says Katherine Lucia McLean. “It helped me grow a lot as an engineering student.”
The FrED factory model enforces true leadership behaviors: coordinating multi-station systems, managing bottlenecks, embedding maintenance logic into the student experience, enforcing quality measurement, and iterating system design year after year. As each class ends and a modern one begins, knowledge is passed on, some of it is lost, and most of it is built upon. In this way, FrED never becomes obsolete as each cohort reinvents technologies and production systems to create a smarter, more productive factory.
FrED and the FrED factory are gaining momentum. Last year, Anthony taught a global capstone course at the Monterrey campus, and in 2027 he will expand to teach at all five of Tec’s international campuses. The FrED Factory Conference will be held at MIT in 2027.