In touch with reality: the digital future of the factory

Manufacturing is changing. The advent of new ways to design things and build them is having an effect not only on the products that factories make but also on the factories themselves, and engineers are increasingly using tools such as virtual reality (VR) to put themselves in the middle of manufacturing processes to work out how humans and machines can work together to make new generations of products.

This is combining with the increasing use of technologies such as additive systems to bring new machinery and tools into the manufacturing sector to create a ‘factory of the future’ that will bear little resemblance even to the highly automated production plants of today.

At the forefront of this change is Lockheed Martin, which is employing a strategy it calls ‘Digital Tapestry’ to incorporate new digital design and manufacture technologies.

Dennis Little, Lockheed Martin’s vice-president for production, explains how the company uses a system it refers to as ‘virtual pathfinding’ to streamline its manufacturing processes to cut the time it takes to build products — notably in its space systems business — and thereby cut costs. This is used as part of a framework called model-based engineering (MBE), which maintains digital data throughout the design and production process, from CAD files through to production. Virtual pathfinding is carried out at the Collaborative Human Immersive Laboratory (CHIL), in Colorado.