The idea of using virtual reality in manufacturing processes is not new. Its value has been proven by designers, engineers and service technicians over more than two decades. Immersive environments that provide scalable, intuitive representations of prototypes and designs enable realistic collaboration, improve the decision-making process, and increase end-customer confidence. For automotive, aerospace and equipment manufacturers using VR visualizations reduces the cost and time of developing physical prototypes, and the cost of rework due to design errors. With today’s computing power and advanced design software, detailed building and factory process modeling is easier to develop and has increasing value. Now VR is an essential tool for organizations with smart manufacturing and digital transformation initiatives. 

The team at the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CCAM), work with interactive virtual reality. (Imge source: CCAM)

The Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CCAM), is one of the only facilities today with an interactive virtual reality (VR) factory model that is an exact representation of the physical machines in the facility.  CCAM, a non-profit research and development center, has members from organizations, such as Siemens, Airbus, Rolls Royce, and NASA Langley Research Center, as well the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech,

and others. Its goals are to provide a collaborative environment for development of innovative manufacturing processes and technologies, and to grow a qualified manufacturing workforce with an industry-driven educational pathway.

CCAM’s “Digital Factory of the Future” helps solve the most complex manufacturing challenges and is used to develop best practices and new processes. Real-time collaboration and intuitive interactivity are enabled by a powerwall from Mechdyne Corporation, which provides an immersive view of the virtual factory. 

CCAM is doing groundbreaking work using immersive visualization to examine processes and performance, according to Matt Stremler, CCAM’s Director of Research. “Visualizing factory dataflow is one of our biggest challenges,” Stremler said. “With a virtual reality factory model, we can work interactively with machine connectivity and the information passing between equipment and controlling processes. The large-scale VR display system we use also provides a useful interface for real time remote operation of robotics in harsh or inaccessible environments.”

CCAM’s virtual reality display system projects 3D images of the factory and/or equipment on an 8’ x 14’ wall and onto a same size floor screen. Users wear light weight shutter glasses fitted with motion trackers. The trackers monitor the user’s position, orientation, and interactions, which change the on-screen images in real-time to match the user’s perspective. When virtual images move in real-time response to motion, the user experiences an extremely convincing sense of presence with the virtual factory.

Users can simply walk around or look under virtual equipment as if they were physically there in the room. The floor projection adds to a more immersive sense of presence when ‘standing’ in the factory model or examining a prototype machine or assembly. The system can be used for virtual prototyping, assembly testing and training, and display of traditional two-dimensional documents and Power Point presentations when scale can benefit communications and teamwork.

CCAM also uses head-mounted displays (HMD) as an alternative resource for immersive experiences. For the collaborative work, which is part of the organization’s mandate, they find the larger scale VR system preferable for several reasons:

• It is typically more comfortable for long work sessions
• Users are not cut off from their real surroundings and can interact with colleagues, take notes, and remain generally aware of what is happening in the room
• Presentations can be made to larger groups without sharing one or more HMDs

When used to design and analyze both products and manufacturing processes, the researchers and partners at CCAM report that interacting with immersive models and visualizations contributes to faster decision making, and programs that help manufacturers control costs and improve safety and quality.

Among the on-going projects at the facility is testing ways to integrate autonomous robots into the Digital Factory of the Future for remote monitoring and tool transport. The organization is also studying how the large-scale immersive display can play a role in cybersecurity informatics and visualizing corporate networks of nodes, switches, routers, firewalls and the flow of data. They believe that for the manufacturing and design enterprise, large-scale immersive visualization provides a perspective that results in new insight into security risks and can uncover Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) to help prevent possible data breaches.

Next-Generation Immersive Displays

The virtual factory model helps CCAM serve its mission by providing a deeper understanding of the factory of the future, including dataflows and processes. The large-scale immersive virtual reality system is an excellent interface for collaboration among its academic, government, and industry ecosystem.

Located in a 62,000 square-foot facility in Prince George County, Virginia, CCAM has more than 35 members, including private companies, local public research universities, and government agencies. Its members share the resources, including pooled talent, advanced tools and technologies, and work together to grow talent and build the manufacturing workforce.

The center focuses on automation, robotics, 3D printing, surface engineering, and artificial intelligence, with the goal of providing a collaborative environment where members work together to develop inventive solutions, particularly for industry sponsored, government funded, academic research programs to make technology useful in meeting real world requirements.

CCAM works closely with one of its member companies to get the most benefit from its large-scale display system. Its engineering team is expert in helping designers convert highly complex 3D models into virtual reality applications that include interactivity. The team created CCAM’s digital factory using a popular game engine with tools that allowed importing CAD or computer-aided design data of the equipment and machinery, as well as enabled creation of physics-based, dynamic, interactive virtual representations of parts, assemblies and the entire facility, and overlaying the real-time information flow.

The CCAM team designs aircraft structural components. (Image source: Mechdyne)

Game engines have become powerful enterprise-level modeling tools, as well.  The trend to integrate VR display systems into next-generation digital factories requires expertise in managing software workflow conversion to interactive VR for a broad range of computer-aided design tools. There are resources available for managing remote collaboration that enable experts from other regions to participate in the virtual design reviews. If organizations do not have the resources to convert CAD to game engines and create virtual environments, there are VR integrators and specialty content organizations who can help designers and engineers develop visualizations, and add elements, such as photorealism, characteristics and behaviors, and complex interactivity.

 The large-scale VR system at CCAM is designed to provide a comfortable setting where teams can collaborate for hours to optimize designs, unlock insights, speed products to market, and inform decision makers. CCAM is using next-gen immersive visualization to enable multiple viewers to experience their own accurate perspectives in large-scale VR environments and share highly realistic motion-tracked simulations, wearing light weight 3D shutter glasses.

To create stereoscopic 3D images, projectors present separate images for right eye and left eye perspectives in a rapidly alternating sequence. The images alternate so quickly, ideally at 60 frames per second per eye, that to the viewer they appear to be on the screen at the same time.  For multiple viewers to each see their own perspective, two images for each user must be on screen at the same time.

Multiple users viewi stereoscopic 3D images. (Image source: Thomas Motta)

Digital Factory of the Future

Will Powers, CCAM’s president and CEO, and the former chief financial officer for aircraft engine maker Rolls-Royce North America believes that, to be successful, next-generation intelligent factories require automation systems which are contextually aware and can adapt to variability in parts, processes, environments, and people. 

Reflecting on the power of using immersive visualization in manufacturing environments, Powers said, “Automation and artificial intelligence are where modern manufacturing is headed. Large-scale immersive VR is an important resource that helps our researchers and members share unique perspectives and better understand the systems and processes under development.”

Digital factories of the future will derive their power from the interconnectivity of computers, machinery, autonomous vehicles, advanced sensor technology, and robotics. The complexity of these interactions can be difficult to conceptualize and make true collaboration challenging. With its wall-sized immersive display system, CCAM researchers and members can more easily share concepts and make discoveries that are only possible to understand through this type of data visualization.

Throughout the design and manufacturing world, virtual reality and augmented reality are playing an increasingly important role in enabling insights that result in better products, reduced costs, and faster time to market. Embracing these tools drives the advances that make manufacturing organizations successful.

David Gsell is general manager of the Mechdyne Software Business Unit at Mechdyne Corporation.

NASA is well along on a new mission that may ultimately save the earth from an event like the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. To Far Side readers, no, it wasn’t because of smoking. Looks like the dinosaurs went through the trauma that Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck try to avoid in the movie, Armageddon, when Earth was threatened by an asteroid on a direct path to our planet.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is a planetary defense-driven test of technologies for preventing an impact of Earth by a hazardous asteroid.  DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique to change the motion of an asteroid in space.

The DART mission is tasked with hitting the moon of this asteroid. Project manager choose an asteroid with a moon so they can measure the ability to move one asteroid by measuring its relation to the other asteroid. (Image source: NASA)

The germ of the idea for DART came from the need to protect the Earth from a potential cataclysmic event of an asteroid hitting the planet. “The DART project just started with scientists thinking about planetary defense and how you deflect a threat,” Elena Adams is a space systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory told Design News. “It’s hard to measure the hit on an asteroid that is traveling by itself, so we decided to find an asteroid with a moon. You can measure the moon before the test and after the test. You can see if you hit the moon hard enough to move it from an hour to 52 minutes.”

DART spacecraft. The DRACO (Didymos Reconnaissance & Asteroid Camera for OpNav) imaging instrument is based on the LORRI high-resolution imager from New Horizons. The left view also shows the Radial Line Slot Array (RLSA) antenna with the ROSAs (Roll-Out Solar Arrays) rolled up. The view on the right shows a clearer view of the NEXT-C ion engine (Image source: NASA)

As well as testing the ability to move a large object in space, the DART mission is also testing a new spacecraft. “We’re demonstrating a NEXT-C engine powered by ions,” said Adams. “DART is the first mission to demonstrate smart navigation, which means we’re going to be guiding ourselves into the asteroid autonomously.”

DART spacecraft with the Roll Out Solar Arrays (ROSA) extended. Each of the two ROSA arrays in 8.6 meters by 2.3 meters. (Image source: NASA)

Once launched, DART will deploy the Roll Out Solar Arrays (ROSA) to provide the solar power needed for the craft’s electric propulsion system. The DART spacecraft will demonstrate the NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster – Commercial (NEXT-C) solar electric propulsion system as part of its in-space propulsion.  NEXT-C is a next-generation system based on the Dawn spacecraft propulsion system that was developed at NASA’s Glenn Research Center. 

As for changing an asteroid’s trajectory the test will help determine the amount of impact necessary to make the difference in the asteroid’s path. “You want to hit the asteroid and see if you can move it. For a larger object, you would use other techniques such as gravity. Then there is the nuclear option,” said Adams. “There will be follow-up missions. The Planetary Defense Coordination Office coordinates different efforts, not just for the US, but for organizations in Europe and other countries. It’s an ongoing effort.”

The DART mission is directed by NASA to the Applied Physics Laboratory with support from several NASA centers:  the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center, Johnson Space Center, Glenn Research Center, and Langley Research Center. 

Elena Adams will present the keynote address, Earth Strikes Back with the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, at the Drive World Conference in Santa Clara August 27-29.

Rob Spiegel has covered automation and control for 19 years, 17 of them for Design News. Other topics he has covered include supply chain technology, alternative energy, and cyber security. For 10 years, he was owner and publisher of the food magazine Chile Pepper.

Drive World with ESC Launches in Silicon Valley

This summer (August 27-29), Drive World Conference & Expo launches in Silicon Valley with North America’s largest embedded systems event, Embedded Systems Conference (ESC). The inaugural three-day showcase brings together the brightest minds across the automotive electronics and embedded systems industries who are looking to shape the technology of tomorrow.

Will you be there to help engineer this shift? Register today!

The Greek god Apollo had many siblings, but only one twin, his sister Artemis. Quite a fitting, Artemis is the name given to the NASA mission that will take up the work of the 1960’s Apollo program. Even more fitting, in Greek mythology, Artemis rules the Moon.

The Artemis mission is planned in eight stages beginning in 2021. By 2024 the mission will take men and women to the Moon. The later stages will create a place where humans live a lunar life, even if just on the Gateway vehicle that will become a Moon-orbiting studio apartment.

News about the details of the mission are coming out nearly every day. Just this Monday, NASA revealed its conception of the Artemis Moon Lander. In the statement that included an artist rendering of the ascent vehicle, NASA noted it is seeking comments from American companies interested in providing an integrated human landing system to put the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024.

Artist’s rendering of an ascent vehicle separating from a descent vehicle and departing the lunar surface. (Image source: NASA)

Seeking Private Sector Input

NASA anticipates a three-stage human landing system. The agency is interested in alternative approaches that can meet the same long-term goals of global lunar access and a reusable landing system. The three-stage concept includes the lunar Gateway to hover in low-lunar orbit to carry the crew to the surface, and an ascent element to return them to the Gateway. From there, they would board Orion for the trip back to Earth.

In a statement NASA Administrator, Jim Bridenstine, noted that “The Gateway will be our home base in lunar orbit – it is our command and service module for missions to the surface of the Moon. Using it as a port for the human landing system, its orbit around the Moon will give us access to the entire lunar surface, and a place to refurbish and refuel the landing system. This is no small feat. Building a 21st century landing system takes the best of our government and private-sector teams.”

The Plans for Returning to the Moon

In May, NASA announced it will return to the Moon by 2024. Here’s the agency’s details about the program to land men and women on the Moon. In this video, NASA also explains the role nine private companies will have in the mission:

The Artemis Mission in Stages

Artemis 1 (2012):

During Artemis 1, Orion will venture thousands of miles beyond the moon during an approximately three-week trip. Artemis 1 is designed to test all the hardware and operations, and then splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off Baja California.

Artemis 2 (2023):

Artemis 2 will be the first mission to the Moon with astronauts on board. Although taking a different trajectory than Artemis 1, this test flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion will test Orion’s life support systems with four astronauts aboard for a 21-day mission. 

Artemis 3 (2024):

This is where men and women actually return to the Moon. It will be the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. It will be a mission lasting less than 30 days, and it will involve a short rendezvous of the Orion capsule with Gateway, the space station in lunar orbit that will have been pieced together during five launches by private space companies under contract to NASA.

Artemis 4 (late 2025):

Astronauts will continue to help build the Gateway’s habitation module and descend to the lunar surface.

Artemis 5 (late 2026):

Astronauts will descend to the lunar surface for various tasks not yet determined.

Artemis 6 (late 2027):

Astronauts will install a robotic arm on Gateway and descend to the lunar surface.

Artemis 7 (early 2028) and Artemis 8 (late 2028):

Astronauts will descend to the lunar surface on one or both of these missions.

Moon Exploration

The first stop on the lunar surface will be the South Pole region, which is believed to contain water ice. It is also potentially rich in other resources, so the area is a good target for future human landing. NASA has studied this region heavily with robots. While this is far from the Apollo landing sites near the lunar equator, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has collected precise information offering details about the South Pole’s topography, temperature and locations of likely frozen water – a necessity for sustainable human exploration.

While water ice is important for sustaining human life, it has other qualities that sustain lunar exploration as well. NASA is considering refueling capabilities to make the landing system reusable, while also working on in-situ resource utilization technologies to make rocket propellants using water ice, and rock and dust from the Moon. Once the ability to harness resources becomes viable, NASA could refuel lunar lander elements with the Moon’s own resources.

Ultimately the Artemis mission may lead to Moon colonization. On a recent press visit to NASA’s Houston facility, agency managers proudly showed off lunar vehicles. They even took a handful of eager journalists on lunar vehicle rides. I felt like a kid at Christmas. When asked if a Moon visit was on the horizon, the NASA host noted, “We’re ready to go as soon as the government pulls the funding trigger.” Well, Houston, that trigger has been pulled.

Rob Spiegel has covered automation and control for 19 years, 17 of them for Design News. Other topics he has covered include supply chain technology, alternative energy, and cyber security. For 10 years, he was owner and publisher of the food magazine Chile Pepper.

Drive World with ESC Launches in Silicon Valley

This summer (August 27-29), Drive World Conference & Expo launches in Silicon Valley with North America’s largest embedded systems event, Embedded Systems Conference (ESC). The inaugural three-day showcase brings together the brightest minds across the automotive electronics and embedded systems industries who are looking to shape the technology of tomorrow.

Will you be there to help engineer this shift? Register today!

All across the world, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson are taking their boyhood dreams of space travel and turning them into commercial space enterprises. Much of NASA’s work is now done by commercial companies. Indeed, when man heads off to the moon again over the coming decade, it will be commercial space vehicles – coordinating with NASA – that will carry the human payload.

Companies such as Boeing are developing space vehicles for private space travel. (Image source: Boeing)

NASA is all for it, since commercial enterprises take a good portion of the burden off taxpayer funding. “Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and others were inspired by the Apollo missions and they were frustrated that space technology petered out after that,” Loretta Hall, author of a number of books space development such as Space Pioneers: In Their Own Words, told Design News. When the manned spaceflight ended with the Apollo missions, these entrepreneurs nurtured dreams of taking the next steps. “Spaceflight didn’t progress beyond the moon like people expected it to, so these private citizens decided to do it themselves.

NASA leaders have viewed the emergence of commercial space companies as an encouraging development. “NASA views it as a positive when they have multiple technologies to choose from. In the past, they designed space equipment and choose someone to build it. Now, a lot of the raw research is going on outside NASA.”

Space Vendors Become Space OEMs

NASA has always used private companies to develop and product technology for space flight, so the aspect of private space technology is not new. “NASA has always had private companies building their equipment, usually aerospace companies already involved with military production,” said Hall. “Companies such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing were involved.”

However, in the past two decades, private companies have started to produce their own space-bound vehicle technology. “What’s new is NASA is no longer the sole customer for commercial producers,” said Hall. “Private companies are either building for themselves or building rockets for other entities. In the past, for anything related to space, NASA was the only buyer. That’s no longer true.”

The Space Passenger May Fund Space R&D

The concept of commercial space often comes from the idea that not all research and development funding has to come from taxpayers. “Commercial space is going into the technical areas of trying to utilize space resources for commercial purposes, and it’s also going in the direction of space tourism because that becomes a way to finance the more technical pursuits,” said Hall.

Even NASA plans to get into the business of commercializing space. “NASA has announced that beginning next year they’re willing to sell tickets for people to spend time on the International Space Station,” said Hall. “They see the value of commercializing space.”

A number of billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson all want to send private citizens to space. Their respective companies, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic are dedicated to making space travel and space tourism more accessible. Here’s how they plan to do it:

Managing Commercial Space Operations

In the past, NASA developed the program and used vendors to build to spec. In the past 15 years, commercial companies have started to develop their own technology. Now when they work with NASA, it’s under an agreement that NASA can’t disclose the technology. “NASA works cooperatively with anyone they’re trying to develop a space product,” said Hall. “Yet the commercial companies don’t want to share any proprietary technology with NASA unless they have an agreement.”

There are also restrictions on how commercial space companies can operate. For one, don’t expect any non-US conglomerates to buy up any of the commercial space companies. “There is a treaty called ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) that put restrictions on what technology American companies can share with other companies,” said Hall. “Anything they do is subject to government approval.”

Even with all of the commercial space development, NASA is still developing its own space technology. “NASA is continuing its development of space launch systems,” said Hall. “They have a rocket in development. There is question about whether it is going to be successful. There have been delays, but that’s sort of normal.”

Rob Spiegel has covered automation and control for 19 years, 17 of them for Design News. Other topics he has covered include supply chain technology, alternative energy, and cyber security. For 10 years, he was owner and publisher of the food magazine Chile Pepper.

Drive World with ESC Launches in Silicon Valley

This summer (August 27-29), Drive World Conference & Expo launches in Silicon Valley with North America’s largest embedded systems event, Embedded Systems Conference (ESC). The inaugural three-day showcase brings together the brightest minds across the automotive electronics and embedded systems industries who are looking to shape the technology of tomorrow.

Will you be there to help engineer this shift? Register today!