Ford Australia Virtual Reality Centre Opens

[russellw]

August 30th 2012

Ford Australia engineers and designers are living in a virtual world – and loving it.

The company has unveiled its new Virtual Reality Centre, which will help streamline vehicle design and engineering processes.
Years before a Ford vehicle shines on stage at a car show or arrives in dealer showrooms, Ford researchers are hard at work behind the scenes, building virtual vehicles that allow the company to design, analyse and enhance the driver experience before a physical vehicle ever exists.

That magic happens in a facility where Hollywood animation and Silicon Valley technology converge with automotive design and engineering to provide digital evaluations of vehicle concepts in a virtual 3D world that is projected on to a 6m x 3m screen known as a Powerwall.

The result is a superior mark of craftsmanship and refined finish that characterises Ford vehicles. The virtual process also speeds up production times while helping reduce costs. Using virtual reality tools, engineers and designers can make consumer-friendly adjustments before the building of a vehicle starts.

The state-of-the-art facility is the same as that developed by Ford in Dearborn. The Ford US team even received a call from NASA asking for a tour of the facility, which has resulted in on-going collaboration.

The Ford Australia VRC is one of just three in the company’s global design centres. The other two are in Dearborn, Michigan and Cologne, Germany.
“In this virtual world, we can evaluate early vehicle design and its engineering against a backdrop of virtual conditions and literally experience a complete vehicle years before it is built and a customer drives it out of the showroom,” according to Adam Frost, Chief Engineer – Global Engineering Services and APA Digital Innovation at Ford Motor Company.
“This helps us to create a car, pick-up or crossover that provides the perfect environment for the driver and its occupants. From a customer’s perspective, before even out first prototype is built, this allows us to finely tune the customer experience.

“Ford’s truly immersive virtual reality technology allows our designers and engineers to connect with our vehicles in a way few auto-makers can. This results in designs that engage the driver and its occupants from the first time they step into the vehicle.”

The VRC is capable of real-time image manipulation, with realistic shading, shadow generation and textural mapping.

Powerwall technology creates not only life-size static images for detailed reviews of new models but also full virtual animation shows. Operators can show the vehicle moving, the doors opening and closing, the instruments functioning and the driving controls operating.
Frost said the benefits of computer-aided design include the rapid, concurrent development and investigation of several design themes. This dramatically reduces time-to-market over the traditional, sequential clay model processes.

“Digital reviews will also allow Ford to introduce higher quality levels at earlier stages in the design and product development process,” he said.
Frost said the virtual vehicles are built up from Ford’s own engineering and design computer files. The modelling is so accurate that you can see internal components and the even the cut-pile of an interior carpet or detailed alloy-look clutch, brake and accelerator pedals.

The Ford Australia VRC is a purpose-built windowless room which contains tracking cameras and two car seats and a mock steering wheel assembly, which is called a buck. The buck sits inside a framework of 16 motion tracking cameras that respond to reference markers on the virtual reality helmets worn by those sitting in the mock car interior.

The high-tech VRC gives the Ford Australia design and engineering teams world-class status. Combined with the company’s engineering and power-train expertise at its Campbellfield headquarters, Ford Australia is a recognised centre of excellence in the Asia Pacific and Africa region.

Virtual Reality Factory
Ford virtual reality world even extends beyond the design and engineering of vehicles to the factory floor. Ford of Europe is developing a complete virtual factory to simulate the end-to-end assembly line production.

This would enable the company to improve quality and cut costs in real-world manufacturing facilities after creating and analysing computer simulations of the complete vehicle production procedures.
Virtual factories will enable Ford to preview and optimise the assembly of future models at any of the company’s plants, anywhere in the world.

Ford assembles thousands of components together to manufacture a finished vehicle. Computer simulation of the assembly process will enable the company to test the vehicle build process before investing in the resources required for a real-world production line.

Ford became one of the first car makers to use computer simulations to plan vehicle assembly at facilities worldwide in 1997. Computer simulation is now an intrinsic part of Ford processes.
The final assembly process simulations being used do much more than simply plan a build sequence for a vehicle. Complete cars can be built in a virtual environment like huge jigsaws and assess the construction down to the finest detail.

The company’s Valencia plant, in Spain, is taking the lead in developing virtual factory environments, which have the potential to enable remote evaluations to be conducted from around the globe.
Special projectors and polarising, motion-sensing glasses are used to create interactive 3D virtual reality manufacturing scenarios.
The actions required by real-life assembly line operators are simulated inside these environments to help Ford ergonomics experts eliminate strenuous postures and optimise individual aspects of the assembly process.

Ford’s ergonomics experts in Cologne, Germany, use computer simulations to scrutinise the fitment process for even the smallest components, and analyse whether changes are required to make the task as straightforward as possible for the assembly-line operator.
Virtual employee “Jack” can simulate the actions of both male and female assembly line employees to test and evaluate processes in fine detail, right down to the manoeuvrability of the operator’s fingers within an enclosed space. “Jack’s” advanced software evaluates the demands on the real-world operator and uncovers 80 per cent of assembly process ergonomics issues at the simulation stage.


Computers Used
- 3 in Australia, 1 in India, 1 in China
- 16 Vicon Bonita 10 Motion Tracking Cameras
- 4 NVIDIA Quadro 6000 graphics cards in Australia, 2 in India, 2 in China
- Hardware output - D-Port converted to DVI-D
- Cooling - Clipsal fan tray 19-inch fan 600mm x 600mm
- NVIS SX-60 Virtual Reality and ST-50 Augmented Reality Head Mounted Displays (immersion headsets)
- Multiple Displays – 24-inch Dell U2410 and 46-inch JVC GD-463D10 3D LCD Monitors
- 48 GB RAM
- Intel Xeon CPU X5690 3.46 GHz (2 Processors)

How much computing power? Apollo 11’s computing power is said to have been 2.048 MHz. The VRC has almost 1700 times more computing power

Data
- Rendered images fully generated from CAD (Computer Aided Design) data
- 190,000 different geometric CAD items that make up a vehicle, for example the Ranger pick-up
- Everything that makes up the vehicle is designed in 3D using computer aided design, full size, located correctly in the 3D world on computer
- All surfaces visible to the customer are crafted and created by Ford industrial design / design / styling team
- When all iterations of these 3D items are added up – almost 10 million optimisations were made for Ranger before a final design was signed off
- These parts were checked 26,000 times for geometric compatibility during the program to ensure parts all fit together in the real world
- Surface Accuracy of data : 0.005 mm (compared to human hair 0.1mm)

Virtual Design process
- 40 virtual gateways (deadlines to be met during virtual design phase)
- Over 55 Terabytes (TB) of computer data makes up the geometry of the Ranger
- When viewing the entire car on a computer software is used that simplifies the geometry so that is easier for the computer to work with. This converts the vehicle into 1 billion triangles – tiny triangles are easier for the computer graphics systems to rotate/visualize
- Computer Aided Engineering (CAE = simulation) models break the car up into 2 million elements (small squares)
- Almost 44 TB of computer simulation (CAE) data was outputted from Ford supercomputers during virtual proving ground testing of Ranger
- Using these models, 9000 virtual crash tests were performed.