Virtual reality finds role in speeding fixture development

Vizient integrates its VR technology in all tooling rollouts to save design, production time

Virtual reality is something that has been promoted in video game development for many years, but it wasn’t until relatively recently that a fully immersive headset was available on the market. Interestingly enough, industry is finding applications for the technology more rapidly than one might expect.

One of the most interesting applications I’ve witnessed thus far is Vizient’s Virtual Reality System. Vizient is a Lincoln Electric-owned company, purchased in May 2016. Vizient Manufacturing Solutions Inc. is a robotic systems integration company. All of its products are engineered and manufactured in-house, which means that finding ways to speed the iteration process of projects can really help the company’s bottom line, as well as its delivery times.

“About 85 per cent of the work we do is custom, one-off, engineered systems,” said Eian Aldrich, systems administrator at Vizient. “When you are designing automation cells primarily for welding and material handling, there are a lot of concept phases that you go through with a customer to make sure the system not only makes sense ergonomically, but also that your welding tooling fixtures are correctly placed. The challenge is, when an engineer is working in CAD, he is seeing everything in two dimensions. It is difficult to gauge reach from that perspective. Even when it comes to loading a part into a fixture, it is hard to get a sense of how it all works until you start building it. At that point, you can end up making a large number of changes.”

Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. The Vizient team jumped on this technology when they knew they had to prove out a design to an important customer. The job in question was to create a large number of manual welding fixtures, some as big as 30 or 40 ft. long. A competitor was claiming that it could create a better solution. Vizient felt that if the customer could actually see their fixture concept, pre-build, it could tip the scales for them.

What made the move possible, according to Aldrich, was the maturing of the hardware available.

“VR a couple of years ago was magnetic sensors, and maybe you had a glove with which you could kind of manipulate things,” Aldrich explained. “There was only a small field of view on a visor, and it was really blurry and didn’t give you a sense of being in front of what you were looking at.”

The technology Vizient employs gives you a full field of view, with room tracking such that you can walk around a space and experience a fixture from all directions.

To be clear, some VR-type headsets make it appear that an object is in front of you in the room in which you stand. For instance, SafanDarley’s EYE, which uses Microsoft’s HoloLens technology, assists a press brake operator by making information about a part that is about to be bent available via tinted glasses. He can still see to bend a part, but within his field of vision he can pull up additional information.

With Vizient’s system, when you put on the goggles, you see only the space created in that virtual world. By importing a CAD geometry and mapping out a customer’s shop space, this makes it possible to create a virtual room that precisely mimics the client’s actual workspace.

Aldrich interfaced a game engine with the hardware to create a system that was lightweight enough and that didn’t make the user motion sick from looking at everything in the headset. A key part of this was ensuring that the resolution was high enough so that the customer could see the fine details of the clamps and other features of a fixture.

A screen capture of a generic tooling fixture generated by the Vizient team.

“Once we got it to where we wanted it, we set the customer’s welders loose on it,” said Aldrich. “When in the VR space, they saw a weld gun in their hand, and they used the hand controllers to manipulate it. They were able to go up to the fixture and make sure, for each step of the process, that the weld gun could reach where it needed to reach. They went through the whole process as a team with a big whiteboard while observing the fixture on a monitor. We were able to make all kinds of great changes right there and then, and we were only two weeks into the design process.”

The VR system allows you to move around the fixture however you want, including crawling under and around it. The hardware knows where the floor is when you calibrate the equipment in a space, so you can accurately judge whether it is too high or too low. If a fixture is going to be in the hands of one particular welder, that can make a significant difference.

If a welder wants to test if he will have sufficient room to complete a weld in a particular spot, he can run a bead in VR. If there is interference from anything, the hand controllers will vibrate in the welder’s hands.

The time savings of this technology has been so immediate that use of the VR technology is mandatory for every tooling system designed at Vizient.

“A lot of our engineers will even use it for smaller jobs,” said Aldrich. “They might want to check that a conveyor placement is correct, or that a robot arm can reach, and they’ll model the geometry and animate it.”

Aldrich is enthusiastic about the time and cost savings the company has achieved in-house, but it’s the customer confidence that is gained that really stands out for him.

“Customers love it because they know what they are going to get when they come in to do their final tests,” he said. “We can show them in a lot more detail what they are buying and how it’s going to work.”

There’s a wow factor to this, but also peripheral benefits. For instance, if a company is having a complete automation system built that will take up the majority of its floor space, the VR can help them ensure that all health and safety concerns are addressed in the rollout early on as well.

Aldrich explained that Vizient’s VR system is still very much a work-in-progress, but that is the beauty of a game engine – it’s a space where, if you can think of it, it can be built at relatively little cost.

This type of technology could eventually change the way design, fab, and assembly processes work, and both fabricators and their customers could benefit.

A Vizient team member using the company's VR equipment.

Editor Robert Colman can be reached at rcolman@canadianfabweld.com.

Vizient Manufacturing Solutions Inc., 563-355-4812, www.vizient.com

About the Author
Canadian Fabricating & Welding

Rob Colman

Editor

1154 Warden Avenue

Toronto, M1R 0A1 Canada

905-235-0471

Robert Colman has worked as a writer and editor for more than 25 years, covering the needs of a variety of trades. He has been dedicated to the metalworking industry for the past 13 years, serving as editor for Metalworking Production & Purchasing (MP&P) and, since January 2016, the editor of Canadian Fabricating & Welding. He graduated with a B.A. degree from McGill University and a Master’s degree from UBC.