Development of an Interactive Virtual Environment for Training Manufacturing Operators
Abstract
The use of virtual reality technologies in education and training can provide an opportunity to reduce training costs while increasing the attractiveness and safety for trainees in the manufacturing industry. This thesis strives to show a virtual world which is based upon real world imagery can be embedded in a virtual reality environment and augmented with underlying real world mathematical models to show in real time the consequences of user selected parameters on a running manufacturing process. An interactive virtual operator training environment is presented utilizing a VR headset in conjunction with a VR gaming engine which supports the headset and also embeds the behavior details of the underlying manufacturing process. To demonstrate this approach an example is developed based on a steel industry roughing mill in which steel slabs are ultimately rolled into coils. This example shows the software application development process given as applied to an interactive training simulator intended for plant operator training which includes the use of the gaming engine Unity 3D, 360-degree video, 3Ds Max and several other software tools. The resulting example is a controllable model of the steel plant roughing mill which can be used to enhanced the knowledge of plant operational personnel as to the effects various operating parameters have on the final rolled product while enhancing the understanding of this mill operation for new plant operators.
Degree
M.Sc.
Advisors
Gray, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Engineering|Computer science|Design|Industrial engineering|Information Technology|Occupational safety
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