A multichannel visualization module for virtual manufacturing

Abstract

The immersive virtual reality (VR) for manufacturing planning helps to cut down the product development period and to improve the quality of the production. However, the immersive VR equipments are generally expensive, both in terms of development and buying. Users spend time to manually repair complex 3D shapes because of imperfect translations between 3D engineering CAD models and the proprietary format of the VR system. In this paper, the proposed VR module uses a commercial virtual manufacturing system (VMS) as the viewer of the immersive VR system on a cluster of PCs and adopts the modified simulation algorithm. The module can make the data translation process unnecessary and ensure good coherence under simulation. At experiment, the proposed immersive VR module was interfaced with the Delmia VMS. Its clustering modules can reduce the cost of VR experiment while offering high performance. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.