Caterpillar Moves Mountains In Speeding Time-to-Market Using CrystalEyes® and Stereo3D Visualization

The most critical aspect of any successful design and manufacturing process is to ensure the product reaches the market in the least time possible with no compromises to quality, safety or reliability. In its ongoing effort to design and produce better products faster, Caterpillar, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of construction, mining and agricultural equipment, has found Stereo3D visualization using CrystalEyes to be indispensable to improving its all-important bottom line and keeping its competitive edge.

According to Dave Cooper, Caterpillar Visual Research Center manager, "We have realized significant cost savings by using CrystalEyes to design machines and remove prototype iterations." Caterpillar's products build, maintain and rebuild the world's infrastructure -- highways, dams, airports, water and sewer systems, office complexes and housing developments. The company's mining machines help extract and deliver raw materials on every continent, while its agricultural machines till the world's soil and harvest its crops.

Caterpillar, headquartered in Peoria, Il., is one of the nation's most successful manufacturing companies. The company's 1997 achievements include being named one of the "World's 100 Best Managed Companies," by Industry Week, and also named one of the "World's Most Admired Companies," by Fortune. Its sales and revenues of $18.9 billion and a profit of $1.7 billion are the best results in Caterpillar's 72-year corporate history. Moreover, exports from the U.S. of $6.1 billion were the highest ever for the company.

Carrying the Load of Change

Among manufacturers of large-scale industrial machinery, Caterpillar has always sought to be the world's leader in delivering quality products with innovations ahead of its competitors. With increased pressure from overseas manufacturers, as well as a rapidly expanding global market, Caterpillar's objective has been to seize new markets with the best products available.

The most effective way for Caterpillar to accomplish this is to produce better machines in less time with lower development costs. To do so required some fundamental changes in the way the company conceived of and executed new product designs. For Caterpillar, that change stemmed from the introduction of computer-based tools and a fully integrated digital design and prototyping process. Moreover, the company required its solution to be cost-effective, cross-platform, easily integrated with existing systems, and simple for its engineers to use.

Caterpillar's process comprised three stages: mechanical design, computer-aided engineering (CAE) and virtual prototyping and simulation. While M/CAD tools were already in place, the second two steps were originally executed only through lengthy and expensive experimentation processes using physical prototypes that cost millions of dollars.

In the new scenario, physical prototypes are never created until the very end of the development process — built only after Caterpillar engineering and management are confident that a high-quality, well-executed product design has transpired. This is where high-performance visualization and CrystalEyes come into the picture.

Stereoscopic Viewing - How CrystalEyes works:

Because of the distance between the two human eyes, each eye sees a scene from a slightly different perspective. The brain integrates the information from these two perspectives to create the perception of three-dimensional space. This effect is known as stereopsis.

CrystalEyes relies on the same stereoscopic principle. The product separates left-eye- and right-eye-specific images by means of special eyewear equipped with liquid crystal shutters. These shutters are activated alternately by an infrared emitter synchronized with the computer display. The result is crisp stereo 3D images without ghosting or double-image artifacts.

Alternately displaying left- and right-eye perspectives on a standard workstation monitor solves a major problem of the past—true control of the z-axis, or depth-dimension, necessary for displaying realistic 3D images. For remote manipulation and viewing of objects, Stereo3D gives the user control along all axes, including the z-axis, of changes made to a structure on the screen.

This ability to view objects in realistic Stereo3D and manipulate the object view is critical to all of Caterpillar’s CAE and virtual prototyping activities.

Mining The Data

Caterpillar's digital development and prototyping process is executed in the following way: Once design objectives are determined, a machine is designed using mechanical CAD tools on HP and SGI UNIX workstations. The result of this design work is then translated into a number of CAE exercises. It is in these CAE operations that CrystalEyes becomes immediately necessary.

For example, Caterpillar can run a complex analysis of gas flow through an engine using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. By optimizing the efficiency of the flow, the engine can be made more powerful, and at the same time, more efficient. In this scenario, the results of the analysis are considered and changes implemented based on a visual interpretation. Yet the visual output of this simulation is highly complex 3D data with critical information displaying along the Z-axis.

"We were unable to do any of this kind of large-scale visualization before we had CrystalEyes," said Cooper.

For Caterpillar, Stereo3D visualization unlocked the vital information hidden inside these complex 3D simulations. The company is also able to perform stress and motion analyses on critical machine components to determine strength, durability and load capacity in a variety of situations. Once again, the complicated graphical result is rendered clear and understandable through the use of stereoscopic visualization capability.

Ultimately, this saves the company from having to build a series of prototype machines and gather this data experimentally over time. In essence, the performance of a machine, as well as its structural dynamics are perfected well before a prototype is ever built.

The third and final step is the design review process. In this step, ideas about improvements and recommended changes are communicated to program managers, project leaders and product developers. With CrystalEyes, it has become much simpler to demonstrate recommended changes in real-time and in real-space, rather than using 2D graphics or describing changes as abstract concepts. Revisions can be done on the fly so the process of review and feedback by upper management is time-efficient. Recommendations can be implemented immediately and seamlessly.

"CrystalEyes allows us to place data in a 3D environment and we can show anybody what we're trying to do without them knowing anything about complicated geometry or math," said Cooper. Ergonomic design and human factors also play a critical part in this design review process.

"Tools on Caterpillar machines are varied and close to the operator. CrystalEyes allows users to see and use those tools as if they were in a real machine. You just can't do that in a 2D world," said Cooper.

Caterpillar’s applications include dVISE from Division, VisLab from EAI, Maya from AliasWavefront and their own applications developed using Performer and Open Inventor. These are typically run on Silicon Graphics computers ranging from O2 systems to large scale Onyx 2 imaging supercomputers.

Harvesting the Benefits

Speeding design processes and dramatically reducing the end-to-end development cycle are paramount in competing successfully on the scale that Caterpillar does. Saving millions of dollars in reduced reliance on physical prototypes is another significant advantage. But for a manufacturing company to be truly successful in its market, everyone in the company must be unified behind a common vision.

Using Stereo3D allows Caterpillar to perform the complex technical tasks it needs to, but also communicate the company's design and production objectives clearly across the organization. Everyone from mechanical designers to senior management can share in an understanding of the company's next-generation efforts, and how those efforts are moving the company ahead of its competition.