Jack in Space

Recently I wrote about the digital humans Jack and Jill from our digital manufacturing solution Tecnomatix. You might be interested in some actual customer stories and the value they get from the technology. Here you go.

USA-Space, a subcontractor to NASA, uses Jack to simulate the assembly of the Orion crew vehicle. The Orion crew vehicle is part of the Constellation Program to send human explorers back to the moon. They are using virtual reality (VR) technologies to analyze the ergonomic situation during the assembly process of the crew vehicle. Using a motion tracking camera system, they are able to bring the motions of real people into the virtual environment and find potentially dangerous design issues. An interesting aspect of this technology at USA-Space is that they are looking at coordinated activities of multiple people lifting heavy parts in a very confined space. The movement information of all the participants is tracked and streamed to the digital human software in real-time for analysis. Both the potential injury risk to the technicians and space limitations can be quickly identified.





The use of this VR technology, along with the digital human tool, helps to validate the assembly process of the Orion crew vehicle without building a physical prototype. Even more important, it detects assembly issues before the physical assembly of the crew vehicle itself, which might otherwise cause time delays and increase costs.

To view the full story you could download the video podcast from NASA Edge here. Please be aware that it’s about 620 MB. To see the part of the podcast that shows the usage of Jack you could jump to 16:55 and move on till 23:55. And take a look at the closing which starts at 31:16.





The pictures are taken from the NASA Edge video podcast 313959main_NE18_640.mp4