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Introduction

Introduction The Divipro (Distributed Interactive VIrtual PROtotyping) project was a European Commission funded initiative involving partners from the UK, Spain, Germany and France. The consortium partners built and evaluated a prototype system for distributed computer aided design (CAD) for mechanical engineering applications. The project had three distinct areas of emphasis: component assembly-simulation with rigid and flexible models, interaction with CAD models using a PHANTOM force feedback device and shared model manipulation by means of a distributed collaborative virtual environment. The project brought together the expertise of seven partners from two types of background: technical partners involved in developing the system and end-users who understood the required functionality and undertook evaluation of the system. Each developer partner brought specialist technologies to the project, and these were integrated into a working distributed system during the course of the project. The German aerospace company DLR provided a flexible body simulator, tuned to computing the deformation of flexible pipes in real time. Labein , a Spanish industry research organisation, provided a Geometric modeller for importing CAD data from STEP files, performing geometric queries and constraint satisfaction. The University of Salford contributed an advanced constraint and assembly manager. We at The University of Manchester utilised our Deva distributed visualisation system and Maverik virtual environment micro-kernel to integrate these very different software components. The prototype application was then evaluated by assembling test cases provided by the end users: KL-Technik Germany, Sener in Spain, and Eurocopter in France. Previous | Next

Divipro Project | Divipro Consortium | Email: divipro@cs.man.ac.uk