On the Scalability of Visualization in Manufacturing
M. Haage, K. Nilsson
To appear in IEEE ETFA'99 (Emerging Technologies in Factory Automation),
1999.
[pdf], [ps.Z]
Abstract
Computer graphics plays an important role in modern engineering of manufacturing
systems, both during design using virtual engineering environments and
also as part of user interfaces to various machines. Existing and emerging
systems today make use of software components, usually providing a graphical
view to the user. In manufacturing, 3D graphics is desirable to visualize
geometries of equipment and work pieces, sometimes also via small dedicated
user interfaces. The established industrial technology does, however, neither
scale down very well to such small platforms, nor do they scale up to safe
operation of large systems. We put forward a notion of executable visualization
and propose a solution based on the Java platform, using Java3D for 3D
visualization in combination with VRML for external representation. Fully
implemented prototypes including both real and virtual industrial robots,
and industrial case studies, have verified the scalability which appears
to be unique.