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NX

Siemens NX Helps University Design Better Soccer Players

June 23, 2014 By Barb Schmitz Leave a Comment

With all the excitement at full tilt with the 2014 FIFA World Cup underway in Brazil, the whole world seems to have gone soccer-crazy, with many people hitting local fields to practice their own ball-handling skills. At Graz University of Technology in Austria, that includes robots. The university is designing and building robots to be superior “soccer players.”

No water bottles required

Propelled by omnidirectional roller drives, the robots are fully autonomous and carry everything on board, from the power supply to the compressed air bottle for the kicking mechanism. The only input from the outside are the referee’s commands.

The need for well-defined, easy-to-communicate rules is critical for testing the efficacy of autonomous robots from an artificial intelligence perspective. Most of all, the test environment must provide changeable conditions that closely mirror reality. The game of soccer fulfills these conditions.

Battling for victory in the RoboCup

The RoboCup competition was established in the 1990s as a test bed for research, development and university education. Matches strictly follow FIFA rules and are played in various categories. Playing soccer, however, is not the point. The goal is to design methods for autonomous robots that can quickly make correct decisions based on their observations.

Propelled by omnidirectional roller drives, the robots are fully autonomous and carry everything on board, from the power supply to the compressed air bottle for the kicking mechanism.
Propelled by omnidirectional roller drives, the robots are fully autonomous and carry everything on board, from the power supply to the compressed air bottle for the kicking mechanism.

For now, robots play against robots in these tournaments. However, a challenge has already been announced: In 2050, a team of robots is scheduled to play the human team holding the World Cup at the time. One team from the university has been participating in the world championship since 2003.

Tackling a new robot design required the team to improve their mechanical design process. “The older robot generations were created with a mix of 3D CAD modeling and hand drawings,” says Norbert Rath, head of mechanical engineering within the group. “This involved using a CAD system that is particularly unwieldy and forces users to employ strictly parametric methods.”

Searching for a better design tool

The CAD tool the team used in the past also had certain shortcomings in drawing conversion. Due to high application complexity, work could not commence without an enormous amount of training and familiarization.

With frequent staff changes, the team searched for an alternative that would provide high-functional capabilities, while being easy to learn with minimal training requirements, along with the ability to distribute work so that multiple team members could contribute to the overall task without requiring significant coordination efforts.

Researchers at Graz University of Technology in Austria are using Siemens NX software to design robots to be superior soccer players.
Researchers at Graz University of Technology in Austria are using Siemens NX software to design robots to be superior soccer players.

As a result, in early in 2009, the RoboCup team licensed NX software from Siemens PLM Software. Adopting the use of NX, Graz University of Technology students reported significant benefits, which included: reduced data preparation work from a week to a day; improved data efficacy; facilitated collaboration between team members; reduced number of physical prototypes; and optimized budget and resources.

To learn more about Siemens NX software, click here.

Barb Schmitz

Filed Under: News, Siemens Blogs, Siemens PLM Tagged With: artificial intelligence, cad, NX

Boots for the boundary-free skier

January 11, 2012 By Laura Carrabine Leave a Comment

Black Diamond Equipment Ltd. makes equipment for climbing and skiing that regularly wins awards for its innovation and quality. Several years ago, Black Diamond decided to apply its expertise to a new area – free-ride ski boots. These boots are used in a certain niche of skiing known as “boundary-free” skiing. Boundary-free skiers strap their skis to a backpack, hike up a mountain (far from a conventional ski resort), and then ski down private slopes. Boundary-free skiers need the comfort and functionality of hiking boots for the climb up as well as the fit and performance of alpine ski boots for the ride down. The boots available at the time were so unsatisfactory that some skiers opted to use two pairs, carrying one pair in their pack so they’d have the right boot available when they needed it.

Black Diamond’s goal was to combine the two sets of performance criteria in one great-looking boot. “The other free-ride boots out there are made by European competitors with 50+ years of boot-making experience,” explains David Narajowski, director of advanced projects at Black Diamond. “Our challenge was not just to catch up to where they were, but to go beyond and create something much better.”

Black Diamond is a long-time user of CAD and has used its original design software, I-deas, from Siemens PLM Software, to develop many of its successful products. At the time the boot project started, however, the company had decided to standardize on the NX digital product development system, also from Siemens, an advanced design solution that still allows the company to leverage its legacy I-deas data. “Black Diamond’s design engineering centers worldwide have moved from I-deas and other CAD systems to standardize on NX,” Narajowski says. He notes, “Between I-deas and NX, there was a period of time when we tried a mid-range CAD program. But there is no way we could have developed a free-ride boot in a mid-range system.”

One of NX’s main advantages, according to Narajowski, is that it provides both the freeform modeling capability needed to capture the company’s design expertise (through the NX Shape Studio application, offered as part of the NX Mach III industrial design solution) as well as the powerful product design tools needed to turn an idea into a manufacturable product. “This is a perfect combination for BD’s hands-on, chop-shop-inspired, fail-fast-to-succeed-sooner approach to design,” says Narajowski. “Working with NX Shape Studio, we can directly manipulate surface geometry to do things like capture anatomical nuances of the foot. And this functionality is integrated with NX product design tools such as WAVE that let us go from one original conceptual model to three different product families with 10 sizes each.”

Jake Hall, Black Diamond’s lead industrial designer on the project, explains the need for such tight integration this way: “One of the great challenges of designing ski boots is that there is very little separation between performance and aesthetics. Fit, performance and aesthetics are one and the same. This means that engineering, industrial design, and manufacturability must be tied together seamlessly in order to create a successful product. Any apparent seams between the two disciplines would result in poor design.

“Fully integrated engineering and industrial design means that we needed both surfaces and solids as native parametric features within a model,” Hall continues. “NX, and particularly the powerful surfacing features in Shape Studio, provided the hybrid capabilities of surfaces and solids that the project required.”

The tight integration between the NX conceptual design and product design environments was key to optimizing the performance of the boot, a task that involved a lot of actual skiing and hiking in prototypes. “If someone came back and complained of pressure here or a pinch there, we could grab those surface points in Shape Studio and easily make a change,” Narajowski notes. “But those changes are not made in a vacuum. It’s not like we throw the design over the wall from industrial design (ID) to engineering and hope the design intent isn’t lost. We’re also using NX tools and the same geometry we create in NX Shape Studio to analyze the boot’s performance and to design injection molded parts. That is the real strength of NX for us.”

Engineers at the Black Diamond headquarters in Utah worked with their colleagues at the Black Diamond office in China on the design of the boot. The ability to share the workload in an efficient and accurate manner is another important benefit of NX on a project such as the free-ride boot, according to Narajowski. “NX allowed us to break up the model and have more than one person working on it at a time,” he explains. “There would be an ID person working on outside surfaces, for example, while someone else was working on the foot shape or on the cutter for the buckles. People could work on their own parts, and then we could pull them in and automatically update the ‘super part.’

Nearly all of the free-ride boot project was done using Siemens software. The integrated nature of the NX solution made it possible for the design team to go through the many iterations they needed to catch up to and surpass the competition. “Without having all that existing experience, we had to try a lot of iterations. We wouldn’t have been able to go through the iterations fast enough without tools like NX,” Narajowski adds.

The boot has been previewed to the industry, to rave reviews, and sales will begin in time for the next ski season. “As the largest, most expensive, complex development project we’ve ever undertaken, it’s hard to contain my enthusiasm about these boots,” says Peter Metcalf, CEO of Black Diamond. “They represent the best of BD today, exemplifying our design philosophy in terms of innovative product. BD boots will fully meet the demands of today’s free-ride skier. We set out to build a better boot for the skier who wants one boot to rip all terrain and our design team has delivered.”

Siemens PLM

www.plm.automation.siemens.com

Filed Under: 3D CAD Package Tips, CAD Industry News, CAD Package, Featured, Siemens Blogs, Siemens PLM, Siemens PLM & Events Tagged With: 3D CAD, I-DEAS, NX, Siemens PLM

Game-changing hockey sticks

October 6, 2011 By Laura Carrabine Leave a Comment

Hockey Robotics pioneered the concept of robotic testing for the hockey industry. It specializes in hockey stick design, performance, and durability testing using an advanced hockey stick testing robot. Hockey sticks most often break during a slap shot; therefore the company’s goal was to produce a robot capable of properly mimicking the professional hockey slap shot. The Hockey Robotics team, with support from industry partnerships, manufactured the SlapShot XT, a hockey stick robot capable of delivering a slap shot at speed up to 110 mph. Hockey stick manufacturers are now using the robot to test their designs in a highly repeatable and controlled manner, providing evaluation data never before available.

The SlapShot XT is the first robot capable of executing a slap shot like a professional hockey player. The robot’s integrated advanced electronics and software allows the gathering of data never seen before, enabling even more detailed analysis of the results to support further refinements in hockey stick design. The SlapShot XT is bringing about revolutionary changes in the way hockey sticks are developed.

MapleSim played a critical role in the design and development of the SlapShot XT. The software allowed Hockey Robotics to efficiently and accurately simulate the coupled dynamic electrical and mechanical behavior of the equipment. MapleSim enabled the concurrent study of the flexible body deformation and rigid body motion of the machines, allowed them to quickly prototype the designs, and investigate the coupled motion of the mechanisms easily. A four-bar mechanism was synthesized to match the hockey player’s motion, and subsequent dynamic and stress analyses were used to develop and confirm the performance of the resulting robot design. A flywheel maintained the stick’s momentum during contact with the ice, and the robotic hands allowed the stick to bend about two axes, storing and releasing strain energy throughout the shot. The final design was evaluated using NX 6.0 from Siemens PLM Software and finite element models of the components.

The robot provides repeatable, unbiased test data on the performance and durability of hockey sticks. According to Dr. John McPhee, chief scientist at Hockey Robotics, “MapleSim allows us to perform engineering analysis that was previously too challenging and computationally intensive for our industry to undertake.”

Future projects at Hockey Robotics involve using MapleSim to develop as rapid prototyping tool that they believe has the potential to permanently change the way that hockey sticks are designed and evaluated. They expect that their new solutions will provide shorter development cycles and substantial reductions in development costs for hockey equipment manufacturers.

Maplesoft

www.maplesoft.com

Filed Under: Siemens PLM, Simulation Software Tagged With: Hockey Robotics, MapleSim, Maplesoft, NX, Siemens PLM, SlapShot XT

Leader in hydropower equipment seeks world-class advantage

September 14, 2011 By Laura Carrabine Leave a Comment

The Flovel Group is a hydropower equipment supplier that provides turnkey solutions for small- and medium-sized hydropower projects. Business units include Flovel Energy Pvt. Ltd., which specializes in the entire range of hydropower equipment and services for design, engineering, manufacturing, installation, and servicing for all heads and outputs covering all types of turbines, and TB Hydro Flovel Valves Pvt. Ltd., which designs and manufactures a variety of inlet, shut-off, regulating, and air valves for turbines.

At one point, Flovel’s management began to look for product development technology that was adept at accelerating the release of highly customized, innovative new products to market, while at the same time being able to ensure the high quality and rigorous accuracy required by its customer base.

To meets its requirements, Flovel selected  products from Siemens PLM Software including Solid Edge, Teamcenter Express, NX, and Femap with NX Nastran. Solid Edge is used for CAD to design complex turbine parts. Flovel based this decision on the software’s ability to handle sophisticated designs, 2D functionality, and sheet metal handling capabilities. Based on the successful use of Solid Edge at Flovel, the company is looking to leverage the product in other areas, including CAE, CAM, and product lifecycle management (PLM).

Using Solid Edge, Flovel has improved its overall design methodology (concept to prototype to product) and cut costs (due to a better understanding of 3D conceptual prototypes). The company cites outstanding ease of use compared to traditional approaches to design, noting that the user-friendly Solid Edge is fostering idea generation and innovation. Flovel also gives Solid Edge praise for superior searching options for making assemblies and points out that the visualization capabilities of Solid Edge measurably accelerates the handling of large assemblies.

Once Solid Edge was in place, Flovel implemented the second step in its product development initiative by adopting Teamcenter Express as its collaborative product data management (cPDM) solution. The goal was to establish a scalable cPDM solution that would facilitate collaboration between all of the key disciplines in the company’s product development operations. The procurement team selected Teamcenter Express for its visualization and collaboration capabilities, strong multi-CAD and multi-site support capabilities, and the ability to streamline the company’s design process. With Teamcenter Express, the company wanted its planning, design, engineering, and production departments to establish a synchronized engineering database with design information that users could easily access, share, and exchange on a secure and controlled basis.

Other goals for Teamcenter Express included establishing drawing number controls and materials codes, identifying the latest versions of their design information, and disseminating information in standard workflow-driven design processes. The company wanted standard, up-to-date information, such as what is contained in product catalogs, quality standards, manuals and plans, to be kept in Teamcenter Express for immediate access. Beyond this, Flovel engaged Teamcenter Express to manage released design information so that it can be leveraged by all of the company’s business units and their manufacturing operations for purposes of improving its CAM and CNC machining processes.

Flovel has extended its design process capabilities by implementing NX which is enabling designers to model difficult surfaces such as runner blades more easily. The company has also implemented Femap with NX Nastran. The intent of this deployment is CAE design optimization.

Currently, Flovel is using Femap with NX Nastran to analyze complex components. The company is performing finite element analysis (FEA) on turbine components for customized applications and operating conditions, as well as using the software to verify designs developed using conventional design tools. In addition, Flovel plans to extend its use of Teamcenter Express to other organizations and integrate the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system into its product development initiative.

Siemens PLM Software                       

www.siemens.com/plm

Flovel

www.flovel.com

Filed Under: 3D CAD Package Tips, CAD Blogs, CAD Industry News, Siemens Blogs, Siemens PLM, Simulation Software Tagged With: cad, Femap, Nastran, NX, PLM, Siemens PLM Software, Solid Edge, Teamcenter, turbines

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