At the SPAR International Conference in Colorado Springs this morning Magnus Rönnäng, Technical Expert in Virtual Manufacturing at Volvo Car Group gave a fascinating presentation on how Volvo has transformed the modeling of their automobile assembly plant using laser scanning.
Volvo is different from many other car manufacturers in having a single assembly line that is driven by customer orders (just-in-time manufacturing). Volvo makes 10 models and at any given time several of these models will be moving down the line.
When they introduce a new model, they can't afford to shut down the assembly line. What they do is simulate in 3D how the new model will progress down the line. Until several years ago they simulated the assembly line using 3D CAD, but just the assembly line not the rest of the plant. That led to problems because they couldn't determine from the simulation whether there was enough room outside of the assembly line to manipulate a new part or assembly. To resolve these issues they needed a model of the entire plant.
The key to keeping the model up to date in a very dynamic plant environment is incremental scanning which allowed them to update only part of the point cloud model of the plant. This technique allowed them to scan new equipment installations and renovations and replace only part of the point cloud model.
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