You expect a toddler to chip or scrape a few blocks while building a tower. But, building a full-scale ship is another story.

Shipbuilders see their construction costs rise sharply and their production time drop when they have to repair ship components that get damaged while being moved about the yard, often by a giant crane, said Patrick Cahill, president and chief executive officer at ShipConstructor Software USA Inc. of Victoria, British Columbia.

The way components are lifted and handled at shipyards often comes about through trial and error. Longtime employees know how best to move fragile components and that knowledge is lost when they retire or move to a different job, Cahill said.

Ship parts need to be loaded precisely when they're being moved by crane. Software under development would make sure the parts are grabbed just right, so that they aren't damaged.

Shipyards need a way to lift ship components safely without damage, he said. To that end, Cahill's company, which makes three-dimensional product modeling software for the maritime industry, is working with Noran Engineering Inc. of Westminster, Calif., on software that could help move ship parts damage-free. Noran makes finite element analysis solutions.

The application, code-named ShipLift, would calculate the proper pickup points and keep that information always on file. A 3-D model of the structure would be created in ShipConstructor's design software. The FEA package, NEi Nastran, would analyze the model for stresses and strains on pieces, and identify the best pickup points for safe free-lifting and handling, said Dave Weinberg, Noran's CEO.

Lifting calculations and operator-handling instructions would be included on the models of the ship parts. Changes to the model would automatically update the FEA calculations, Weinberg said.

The U.S. Navy is funding the joint project through its Small Business Innovative Research program.

The fellow, dubbed Mirrobot, is a truly fearsome sight: as tall as a basketball player, with a bald, bluish head and steel extremities that look rather skeletal.

But Mirrobot—if not a pussycat— is a kind of copycat. As soon as someone in the right place raises an arm, the robot moves its arm, too. If the person stretches both arms sideways, Mirrobot does the same thing—as though
it were a live mirror image.

"A crowd gathers every time the robot moves," said Ulrich Reiser. He and his colleagues at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation in Stuttgart, Germany, breathed artificial life into the machine.

Although the robot looks like a gimmick, it actually demonstrates marked research into robot control, said Achim Breckweg, the team leader. The research group wants to eventually create an automatic assistant that can vacuum the carpet, fetch the newspaper, and cook pasta.

However, one of the biggest challenges is human-machine interaction: Just how does one tell the robot what to do?

Programmers have a relatively easy time writing sets of instructions for industrial robots that constantly repeat the same maneuvers. But they have a harder time writing programs for a service robot that has to perform reliably in a constantly changing environment amid the domestic clutter of someone's home, Breckweg said.

While there are already voice recognition programs on the market, machines are not yet capable of understanding gestures. But Mirrobot shows that this problem can be solved, Breckweg said. A miniature camera helps the robot interpret gestures. The camera measures distances by recording the time traveled by infrared rays, thus delivering a 3-D picture of the environment. From this, an image-processing program determines the spatial position of the user's hands and head.

Now, the robot has to learn the meaning of certain gestures when accompanied by spoken commands, Reiser said.

While we won't see an affordable service robot on the market for a long time, Breckweg is convinced that as time progresses, service robots will be able to take over increasingly complex household tasks.

Pickles are picked, yes. But if they're not canned in grandma's kitchen, it's likely that a large pickle processor—and large machinery—is involved.

The Mt. Olive Pickle Co. of Mount Olive, N.C., uses CAD software to design its pickle-processing plant machinery.

The pickle packer's plant includes more than 1,200 fiberglass and plastic brine vats, which can store in excess of 40 million pounds of cucumbers, said Jimmy Carr, the plant engineer at Mt. Olive. The packaging process requires customized conveyors, washing, cutting, and pasteurization and filling equipment.

Carr and his staff use Autodesk Inventor software to lay out how to best route piping runs, purity-process lines, and utility piping like air, water, and steam. They also store their design records within the software.

"Having our machinery, mechanicals, and buildings documented allows us to troubleshoot production problems efficiently, resulting in a reduction of costly downtime," Carr said.

Engineering and swimming may not seem to have much in common. Yet a swimwear maker relies on one of the same software applications as do engineers.

To better understand just how water flows around a swimmer, the swimwear designers at Speedo of London used computational fluid dynamics software. They analyzed data from Olympic swimmers who were closely monitored in the company's Aqualab research and development facility.

Results in hand, the designers are now busy upgrading the company's Fastskin swimwear, which they say reduces skin-friction drag as a swimmer moves through the water. The material resembles a shark's skin, down to tiny riblets on the surface, said Barry Bixler, a member of the Aqualab research and development team.

Designers are rerunning CFD models of previous designs to create ever more hydrodynamic models that further reduce high skin-friction drag, he added.

CFD modeling shows how the water flows around the body. Speedo has designed different suits for male and female athletes because Bixler and his crew have determined via CFD analysis that females exhibit greater separated flow—where the water actually leaves the surface of the swimmer—than males.

The Aqualab uses CFD software from Fluent of Lebanon, N.H., and hardware from Silicon Graphics of Mountain View, Calif.

There's always room to cut the production cycle a little more. But finding that wiggle room can be a challenge.

ASH Industries of Lafayette, La., which makes thermoplastic injection-molded parts and the tooling and molds to make those parts, was able to find the wiggle room.

ASH Industries, which makes plastic parts, slashed production time with help of molding analysis software, pictured running above.

The company worked with a consulting firm to shortened project cycle time. That firm ran software that analyzed how engineers could cut waste while making a plastic part, said Steve Andrepont, ASH's engineering manager. CAE Services of Batavia, Ill., did the analysis, using Moldflow software from Moldflow Corp. of Framingham, Mass.

"Prior to conducting the analysis, we knew the process window would be very tight, room for adjustment non- existent, and our customer was intolerant of variability," Andrepont said.

"We needed predictable molding results very quickly. We expected to have a window into the process that reflected our experience and warned us of aspects we had not considered," Andrepont explained.

The consulting company and its software helped ASH find that window, he added.

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But is the same true if the beholder is beheld through a computer's eye?

Apparently, yes. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University in University Park have developed computational-aesthetics software that computers use to cull aesthetically pleasing photographs from their not-so-attractive counterparts. The software then makes its cuts based on dozens of preprogrammed visual features.

Why would engineers care about software that evinces an eye toward beauty? They might one day use it to home in on the best images or CAD drawings among the many returned when they're searching for particular files or images, said James Wang, an assistant professor in the university's College of Information Sciences and Technology.

"The software trains computers to judge photographs on 56 different visual features, such as color saturation, exposure, and composition," Wang said. "On average, if people think something is a good picture, our computer thinks so, too."

Obviously, no standard of beauty exists universally. But Wang and his team have identified certain visual features of photographs as generally pleasing. These include contrast, perspective, texture, color saturation, exposure, and composition.

DaimlerChrysler uses a shape-search engine to find duplicate or similar parts in its extensive product lifecycle management system.

That's right. Engineers search the system by shape, rather than name. What's the benefit? It's much easier to find duplicate parts, so engineers don't have to create parts already in the system again and again, said Ulrich Sälzer, director of IT Commercial Vehicles Development at DaimlerChrysler of Stuttgart, Germany.

Geolus Search, from UGS of Plano, Texas, culls through a company's product data management system to come up with requested part designs. It's powered by geometry. That is, it compares CAD files or geometry files to return matching parts. No words are necessary.

"DaimlerChrysler Commercial Vehicles has used this product for the past three years as a way to enhance product design and avoid costs associated with creating duplicate or similar parts," Sälzer said.

The technology really can help cut costs significantly.

"Redundant parts proliferation can add 30 to 40 percent to a manufacturer's inventory carrying costs," said Jim Brown, vice president of product innovation and engineering research at the information technology research and analysis company Aberdeen Group of Boston.

College engineering teams from more than 30 universities converged at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this summer with a laudable goal.

They wanted to leapfrog the state-of-the-art for noncarbon hybrid cars, said Anna Jaffe, an MIT sophomore and the event organizer. At the vehicle design summit—held from mid-June through mid-August—students worked together to design a car that would use a minimal amount of gasoline. They next plan to drive the car across the United States, with plenty of stops along the way to explain the technology.

"The idea behind the Vehicle Design Summit is to channel energies in a direction that might directly benefit the world more than pure racing does," Jaffe said. "Our designs will reflect practical concerns, like driving unsupported on real roads at viable speeds in countries with limited financial resources.

"We want to design better products that are drivable, parkable, economical, and sustainable," she said. "At the same time, as a student-led research initiative, we have the design freedom to investigate technologies many would deem too risky to pursue in a commercial setting."

The students will use donated CAD software from SolidWorks of Concord, Mass., to help with design.

CAD maker SolidWorks Corp. of Concord, Mass., has acquired GCS Scandinavia AB of Sweden, which developed Conisio, an enterprise product data management program.

Engineous Software of Cary, N.C., provider of automation and design optimization software, is shipping Fiper 2.0, for storing, sharing, and deploying integrated design analysis models.

3D Systems Corp. of Valencia, Calif., has released a suite of software, 3DView, 3DManage, and 3Dprint, for its stereolithography systems, selective laser sintering systems, and InVision 3-D printers.

A maker of global positioning system technology, Trimble of Sunnyvale, Calif., has acquired BitWyse Solutions Inc. of Salem, Mass., a data management company specializing in 2-D and 3-D software applications for engineering and construction plant design. The move should extend Trimble's product portfolio of 3-D laser scanning applications.

The shareholders of MachineWorks Ltd. of Sheffield, England, which makes numerically controlled simulation and verification software, have sold the company to its management team. VSI Ltd. is a holding company created as a vehicle for the buyout.

Geomagic of Research Triangle Park, N.C., has been issued a patent for its process of automatically generating
3-D digital models from scanned point-cloud data, which the company calls its wrap process.

Coade Inc. of Houston has introduced the CADWorx 2007 process plant design suite.

A provider of rapid parts, Prototypes of Atlanta, can now manufacture custom parts directly from the user's uploaded CAD file.

Wolfram Research of Champaign, Ill., has released Wolfram Workbench, an integrated development environment for developing technical tools.

Ansys Inc. of Southpointe, Pa., which makes analysis software, has partnered with MatWeb of Blacksburg, Va., a provider of technical material data sheets, for access to material property data from within Ansys Workbench.

The CAD program BRL-CAD from the company of the same name in Belcamp, Md., is now available for Windows.

Inspection-system maker Camtek of Malvern, England, has joined the Make It With Lasers initiative, aimed at promoting the use of laser technology within industry. Camtek makes CAD and computer-aided manufacturing laser applications.

Fluids simulation software maker Flomerics of Marlborough, Mass., has acquired Nika GmbH, an engineering fluid dynamics software company in Frankfurt, Germany. Nika makes simulation tools that predict fluid flow and heat transfer.

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© 2006 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers