VR in manufacturing – vanity project or the final piece of the digital jigsaw?
11 December 2017
The last two decades have been a rollercoaster ride of vertiginous proportions for Virtual Reality (VR). Hailed as THE coming technology in the 1990s, it fell flat on its face when the actual deliverables were small compared with the massive outlay needed for mammoth mainframe computers.
Whispers could no longer be ignored when the then technology editor of the FT declared: “VR is dead” and everyone knew of one flagship system that was only fired up as the gimmicky highlight of a factory tour.
Companies in VR went out of business or laid low, describing themselves as facilitators of advanced visualisation, which confused people, because they thought it was the same as CAD. But all the while, computing power was increasing and the price was dropping. Those mainframes were no longer needed, as a workstation, or even a powerful laptop, would now suffice.
Quarter of a century on from that first buzz, VR’s stock as a technology is once again riding high. The focus isn’t so much on the sheer wow of that third dimension (though that is still there), but what it can actually deliver as demonstrable business improvements.
Then the tide turned
Naturally, the early uses of VR were focused solely on design, but then it quickly became apparent that if you have invested in high end CAD, that investment can be used by people who aren’t design engineers. The same data model can be deployed in a completely different way by manufacturing engineers, training and ergonomics specialists, the marketing department, the recruiters and even the facilities management people. The buzz was no longer the wow about the third dimension, but about what the virtual world was delivering in the real world. Accountants sat up and took notice.
Siemens is typical. They have called their facility in Congleton, Cheshire, “The Digital Factory”. It designs and manufactures variable speed drives for motors. Its customers come mainly from the automotive sector, machine building (OEMs), pumps and fans and the airport industry. Although there are only five decentralised product ranges and four cabinet-based systems, the inherent modularity of these drives, plus the many different frame sizes, mean that there are thousands of potential product configurations.
Siemens’ VR journey
Siemens embarked on its VR journey with a clear vision of what it wanted to achieve:
• Simulating and optimising assembly processes
• Effective factory planning
• Efficient design concepts and reviews
• Lean work-cell design
Simon Charlson, mechanical team leader at Siemens, was heavily involved in researching the kind of system and software that could fulfil the company’s needs. “Our product review and Lean Cell Design teams are up to 10 strong, so we went for a bigger Virtalis ActiveWall display system with a projected wall and floor combined with optical tracking for group immersive and collaborative activities and a Head Mounted Display-based Virtalis ActiveSpace for additional levels of personal immersion.”
Unexpected benefits
Carl German, a Siemens’ transformation manager, explained: “Our VR has been a game-changer for us and how we work. It’s no exaggeration to say it has changed the way we think and act. Every single production operative in the factory has either seen or experienced it. It’s key that the technology is not seen as something for a privileged few. As a result, we now bring VR into every facet of what we do.”
Siemens has continued to diversify its use of VR technology and is using VR for everyday uses, such as office moves. Here, Adrian Webster, Siemens’ layout planning engineer, finds that Virtalis’ Visionary Render software is ideal. “It is intuitive and anyone can get the hang of it quickly to navigate round the model, so I can help people visualise their new working environments.” Visionary Render is specialist VR software that allows users to access and experience a real-time, interactive and immersive VR environment created from CAD and other datasets.
Transforming working practices
Adrian commented: “VR removes the big issues early on and lets us concentrate on simple refinements. Typically, we build a mock-up of a new cell on the factory floor. Previously, we would need to leave it there for four weeks to resolve all the issues. Now, we are finding two days’ digital review plus just one week on the factory floor solves all the issues. VR is excellent at fostering multi-disciplinary communication. The people who have input into new designs are diverse: production engineers, test engineers, production operatives and production leadership. Sometimes they obtain extra expertise from R&D or from mechanical and electrical engineers too, or even logistics and facilities people and contractors. All these stakeholders work together in the VR environment to perfect the design and get the requisite buy-in.”
Saving money
The Siemens team is finding that the Virtalis VR is saving them money by enabling the virtual interrogation of belts and driving mechanisms, for example, as part of OEM production equipment specification, resulting in demonstrably fewer mistakes. A recent VR design review picked up a clash within two minutes that had not been clear on a CAD workstation.
“It is costly to create the tooling to manufacture a new product”, explained Simon, “and mistakes tend to be expensive. We are now working with our suppliers to bring their virtual tooling into our design reviews.”
Anil Thomas, a transformation manager at Siemens, commented: “Typically, we’re finding that we are reducing the snagging list of a new cell design by 90 percent. We are even finding more and different snags virtually and solving them in VR. This will certainly have a positive impact on our product lifecycle. We are not resting on our laurels, as it is apparent there is much more we can do with this technology.”
VR enabling business process simulation
Lanner, the company behind WITNESS business process simulation, worked with Virtalis to VR-enable their software, offering users the option to visualise their models in enhanced 3D in a single click. The full Visionary Render for WITNESS software allows Lanner customers to experience their virtual data in a truly immersive VR world.
Lanner’s Head of Products said: “To the professional operational analysts who form the majority of our user base, modelling capability and efficacy is key. When you are spending hundreds of millions building a gas pipeline, constructing a hospital or planning the manufacturing facilities for a new model of car, the critical factor is whether the model accurately predicts future performance. However, once the model has been verified and an optimal solution to the business problem found, then this has to be communicated to the stakeholders, which often requires presenting the results visually, so they can be more easily understood.”
VR as a training tool
Schneider Electric has used its CAD data to build a complex and fully interactive VR model which allows trainees to ‘get their hands on’ the switchgear and interact with it in a realistic manner. This has major benefits: being quick, clean, safe and rapidly repeatable in a risk-free environment. The fact that it is virtual means that expensive and often dangerous hardware is no longer required.
Claude Houbart-Santini, Schneider Electric’s customer training manager explained: “VR is enabling us to do and see things that we can’t in real life. The modules we’ve commissioned feature additional pedagogical benefits that go beyond classroom training and even hands-on training because, in the virtual world, our cabinets have current running through them, making all the sounds and reacting in all the ways you’d expect in real life. In our hands-on training, safety dictates there is no current. In the Virtalis virtual training environment, it is also possible to virtually strip back our equipment, so that in the Medium Voltage switchgear, trainees can see the working parts, which really helps them to understand our technology.”
The future for VR within manufacturing
Schneider’s VR training environment uses a controller to interact with its 3D model, but advances in VR glove and gesture-control technology mean that they could provide a more intuitive conduit for natural interaction with the model. Similarly, though Schneider uses the portable ActiveMove for training purposes, Augmented Reality devices are becoming smaller, lighter and display better graphics, so this technology could easily be added to create a shopfloor training variant that is fast and flexible to use.
Increasingly, data isn’t all packaged up neatly from a single CAD source, but can be from laser scans or even real-life images. These are being increasingly overlaid onto 3D models so VR becomes like a visual glue, sticking together CAD data, meta data, movement data and analytical data, all on one virtual prototype that everyone can see and easily understand.
The holy grail of VR is bi-directionality, meaning changes made in the VR scene are reflected back in the CAD system to create a seamless whole. Imagine what that would mean for VR functionality… watch this space!
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