PI:  Eliot Winer

[Deere & Company: Phase 5 Research]

Summary: VRAC's expertise in emerging interface technologies addresses a diverse range of challenging problems, including those of leading industry innovators. VRAC's partnership with Deere and Company, one of the world's leading manufacturers of agricultural, forestry, construction, and turf-care equipment, is one example.

The relationship between VRAC and Deere and Company began in 1994 with a modest research grant. Now multiple projects funded on three-year cycles are led by faculty members and staffed by graduate and undergraduate student research teams. These projects show the ways that VR technologies from desktop applications to fully immersive environments are used in exciting and productive ways to simulate vehicle operations, evaluate human factors and ergonomics, analyze complex engineering data, and build capabilities in a broad range of product and manufacturing process development and business applications. Here are some examples of the projects that VRAC and Deere and Company are working on over the next three years.

• Virtual Training, Assembly, and Maintenance Methods
• Development of the Advanced Systems Design Suite
• Development of VR Simulator for 3D Painter Training
• VR Simulation for 3D PaintDeveloping a Systems Engineering Workshop
• Weld Quality
• Improved Reliability through Linked Information Gathering
• Extensible Virtual Engineering Tools for Improved Product Design
• Developing Tools for the Design of Multiphase Flows
• Stress for John Deere Fatigue Life Prediction Applications
• Enhancing Realism and Flexibility of VR-Based Real-Time Dynamic Simulation Framework with Operator and Hardware In-the-loop Interface
• Integrated Robust Optimal Design (IROD) for Quality Improvement and Cost Reduction in Product Development
• Tool Tracking for Improved Quality and Validation of Complex Manufacturing Processes