COVER STORY | AUGMENTED REALITY
BAU BIELTDTINEGR REALITY
Augmented reality is a relatively new
technology, but the role it has played in
meeting the UK’s Ventilator Challenge has
proved its value.
One of the striking things
about the response of
business to the pandemic
has been the speed with
which companies have embraced
technology in order to allow them to
function in as near-normal a way as
possible. For instance, it’s a fair bet
to say that by now we are mostly all
habitual users of video conferencing
platforms and think nothing of sharing
our desktops with colleagues.
This phenomenon has also been
observable in the engineering
sphere, with technologies and
products that might previously have
been thought niche or in their infancy
being brought to bear to address the
peculiar set of problems posed by the
current circumstances and proving
their worth.
One such technology has been
Augmented Reality (AR) supplied
by PTC, which has played a pivotal
role in the widely-publicised
VentilatorChallengeUK campaign to
produce ventilators for the National
Health Service’s response to Covid-19.
As covered in last month’s
issue, the VentilatorChallengeUK
consortium led by High Value
Manufacturing Catapult CEO Dick
Elsy and a host of the UK’s leading
engineering businesses, including,
but not exclusively, Ford Motor
Company, GKN Aerospace, McLaren,
Airbus, Meggitt and Siemens UK.
Experts have been working with
existing ventilator manufacturers
Smiths Group and Penlon to document
crucial assembly processes involved
in the development and build of
Rapidly Manufactured Ventilator
Systems (RMVS).
The consortium has used
PTC’s Vuforia Expert Capture AR
technology and Microsoft’s HoloLens
to capture the crucial assembly steps
and processes involved in building
Rapidly Manufactured Ventilator
Systems (RMVS). This will be
uploaded and edited in PTC’s Vuforia
Editor technology, which runs on
Microsoft Azure, to create a virtual
assembly guide and relayed, through
wearable equipment or smart
devices such as phone or tablet, to the
factories of consortium partners that
traditionally do not make ventilators.
Paul Haimes, Vice President
of Field Engineering at PTC
explains the background to PTC’s
involvement. “We’ve got a very
strong partnership with Microsoft
both from the cloud perspective and
also from the point of view of using
the HoloLens to showcase what we
do with our Vuforia technology,” he
says. “We also have a close working
relationship with many of the High
Value Manufacturing Catapult
centres, of which Dick Elsy is chair.
“So back in April I got a call
from Microsoft on the Thursday and
then another call from the AMRC
Advanced Manufacturing Research
Centre on the Friday and it was on
a Friday evening quite late that the
call to action came in. And I think the
conference calls with Microsoft and
with some of the other team members
started about 10 O’clock on a Friday
evening with a view that we would
have somebody on site rst thing
Saturday morning.”
Clearly the speed with which
events unfolded was one of
the biggest challenges for the
Consortium, as Haimes makes
clear: “It really was a scramble to
get people moving and get get the
right individuals in the right places
for the right times,” he says. “But I
think as you’ve seen from many of the
companies that have been involved, it
really has galvanised a huge number
of the UK’s leading manufacturing
companies. And I don’t think anybody
questioned what they were being
asked to do. It was a case of ‘let’s get
rolling, let’s get moving’ and we were
on site together with Smiths Medical
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