Integration of Virtual Reality in a Knowledge-based Engineering System for Preliminary Configuration and Quotation of Assembly Lines

Realistic visualization of products is now a must-have for all companies facing worldwide and highly competitive market. Despite Virtual Reality technologies are appealing, its industrial use is still limited to conceptual design and prototyping activities. One of the reason is that generating Virtual Reality (VR) environment is a complex and time-consuming task, especially for complex products or systems. Many technical data are involved in their design and conguration. A meaningful example is the preliminary conguration of assembly lines devoted to deliver a quotation to the customer. To be competitive, the quotation should be completed in tight time and contain variants of the congured system ranging dierent costs. Moreover, high-impact and successful quotation goes beyond the merely technical aspect. In this view, the automatic generation of a virtual reality environment can foster the adoption of this technology in industry, since its setup time is short and doesn't require any skills. In this paper, the integration of a VR module in product conguration and quotation process is proposed. The framework is a Knowledge-based Engineering (KBE) system that, taken the customer requirements as input is able to automatically generate a bunch of dierent solutions. Starting from technical data coming from a KBE system, a virtual environment is generated automatically tting the features of the congured solution. Furthermore, the immersivity of the VR scene is enhanced by integrating the animation of the objects, like robots and pallets. After a brief description of the KBE system, the paper details the information is involved in, the implementation of the VR module and its integration within the KBE framework.