Virtual Reality

Competence in building more innovative ships will help the German Maritime Industry guaranteeing its existence under competitive conditions in respect to Asia. The realistic visualisation with Virtual Reality (VR) enables the demonstration of the shipyard’s design competence to the customer in an early stage as well as the discussion of design decisions and their implications between ship yard and supplier. Using the example of shipbuilding, the article shows which changes in the business processes of a company are essential for an efficient use of VR and which add-ons are necessary for a user-oriented ease of operation.

The Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries”, funded by the German Research Foundation, at the RWTH Aachen University develops solutions to improve the competitiveness of production in Germany. In the future, production systems should be capable of independently adapting to new conditions as a result of the development of cognitive controls, e.g., for robot-aided assembly processes. The tasks of humans will thereby focus primarily on system monitoring and direct cooperation with robots. A system developed at the IAW serves as the foundation for the design of AR-based user interfaces for computer-supported planning of human-robot cooperation processes.

Developing and testing and operating complex machinery and repairing it under time pressure if it breaks down - individuals in many professions have to learn new skills. Moreover, they have to do so as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. Virtual technologies are supporting learning more and more frequently. Operations and procedures on machinery and plants are already taught in individual lessons on the virtual model. They can be repeated as often as desired without the space or time constraints of real machinery and without endangering either operator or plants through incorrect behaviour and can be practiced before a real machine or plant has been constructed.

Virtual Reality methods will open new ways for generating a virtual machine tool in the near future. Based on the experience gained in the development of prototypes, a virtual development platform for machine tools with parallel kinematics is striven for. Based on such a complex engineering solution, the assessment of, for example, the redundancy and size of the workspace as well as collision aspects and the avoidance of both singularities and certain mechanical characteristics of the construction will be fundamentally simplified. This, in turn, will ensure shorter iteration cycles in the development of an optimal machine structure and forms the basis for test operations within the virtual production process. The development process for machine tools with parallel kinematics will thus no longer be of a linear nature, but will be defined as an overall process in the form of concurrent engineering.

Today manufacturers of complex investment goods concentrate on their core business and retrieve additional services from external subcontractors. Many design reviews are necessary to coordinate such cooperation. They cause high expense for manpower and for travel. In the research project “Digital Product Development with Virtually Cooperating Teams using Optical Networks” a new conference system will be realised, which utilizes Virtual Reality (VR). This paper describes the requirements and the process flow of future distributed design reviews as well as the method of solution which is prototypical realized in the project ProViT.