Visual Components Connector for NVIDIA Omniverse: a perfect recipe for manufacturing digitalization
The combination of Visual Components manufacturing simulation and NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art computing knowledge results in a powerful solution for the digitalization of the manufacturing industry.
By Umair Ejaz, Product Marketing Manager, Visual Components
The success of any manufacturing project largely depends on how well it is planned. It is important to understand, especially for the decision-makers, that manufacturing planning requires not just operational experience but also the correct use of the most optimal modern solutions.
Visual Components has been helping the manufacturing industry resolve its operational and planning challenges for years through easy-to-use simulation solutions.
The Visual Components Omniverse Connector offers a unique opportunity for the manufacturing industry to truly build a virtual world that emulates their operations and connects these virtual configurations with the real assets to create the digital twins.
The Value of Visual Components Connector for NVIDIA Omniverse
The combination of Visual Components and NVIDIA Omniverse results in a powerful workflow solution as it merges the best of Visual Components manufacturing simulation features and NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art computing knowledge to create physically accurate virtual worlds.
The value of the Visual Components Connector can be elaborated on at different levels. The first level, or outer shell, covers the photo-realistic ray tracing visual capability of Omniverse with the true-to-reality accuracy of the PhysX physics simulation engine that helps build virtual worlds with life-like physical properties.
If we look a bit deeper into it, the live bi-directional communication between Visual Components and Omniverse offers benefits in terms of multi-user remote collaboration. This streamlines the project design communication by avoiding the need for constant export-import of files when any iterations or changes are made.
The real value, however, is that it opens a gateway to a range of applications either developed by NVIDIA or other vendor-specific solutions for countless possibilities and use cases, some of which are known but many yet to be explored.
Visual Components and NVIDIA Omniverse: Opening New Opportunities
Delta Electronics, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturing company, is using the combination of Visual Components, NVIDIA Omniverse, and Isaac Sim. Isaac Sim, powered by Omniverse, is a scalable robotics simulation application and synthetic data generation tool to develop, test, and manage AI-based robots.
For this case, this client uses Visual Components to quickly set up the robot cell with simple plug-and-play features and hundreds of ready to simulate 3D models. One of the robots in this cell has a camera that’s used to check if certain parts are correctly positioned and inserted according to the requirements.
The client programs their robots with Visual Components powerful OLP features and simulates the programs to ensure the accuracy and cycle times. Once the robot programs are verified, they use the Visual Components connector to sync the design with Omniverse Nucleus database server which is connected to Isaac Sim.
Delta is teaching the AI to recognize the correct actions first before executing the robot program through Isaac Sim. Additionally, this project also helps in virtual yet realistic training before any real deployment saving time and costs from the project schedule. This is just one of the use cases of how the customers can benefit from Visual Components and Omniverse connection.
Data Compatibility
We mentioned earlier that the real value of the Visual Components Connector is to enable the connection with a range of other apps through the Omniverse platform. The additional advantage of this ecosystem is the uniformity of the data sets. The data set of all the apps that connect to Omniverse is in Universal Scene Description (USD) file format.
Universal Scene Description (USD) is an open-source 3D scene description and a file format developed by Pixar that not just enables the creation of photo-realistic visual content but is also widely adopted in manufacturing, robotics, design, and other disciplines.
So, if we consider the workflow, the Visual Components Connector shares the Visual Components simulation models with Omniverse which then further enables them to be shared with other applications through USD files. The Visual Components Connector can be used to both export and live sync the manufacturing layouts with Omniverse.
Note: It is important to remember that NVIDIA Omniverse capabilities are available to the Premium users with the latest version of Visual Components. To read more about this announcement, read the Visual Components Blog.
Meet the Author
Umair Ejaz, Product Marketing Manager, Visual Components
Umair is focused on product communication, technical marketing, and content creation at Visual Components.
