SAMIRA II by EADS in conjunction with Airbus

SAMIRA: Interactive Maintenance Simulation with Haptic Feedback

Samira II is an interactive simulation system for assembly/disassembly operations, used to experiment with various scenarios and validate maintenance concepts. This simulator, used to train maintenance operators, avoids immobilizing aircrafts and helicopters during training sessions.

Thanks to SAMIRA II, the user is able to visualize a 3D virtual assembly process (with or without stereoscopy), and to manipulate objects by feeling contact forces/collisions via a force feedback system.

As a comprehensive distributed framework, this system is made of different functional entities:

• A mission configurator (scenarios and 3D scene)
• A visualization interface
• A physics simulation system
• Interaction devices (force feedback system and its control device).

Developed in conjunction with Airbus, this commercial project can now be adapted to other EADS affiliates, like Eurocopter.

EADS CCR

EADS (European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company) is the largest aerospace company in Europe and the second largest worldwide in the fields of civil and military aircraft, space, defense systems and services. With more
than 70 production sites in France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain and USA, the company employs over 100,000 people. As the French EADS Corporate Research Center, EADS CCR’s mission is to create a competitive advantage by providing innovation and services for EADS business units and its customers.

The Challenge

SAMIRA II project required the integration of several technologies to obtain a realistic and immersive scene of assembly/disassembly scenarios:

• Distributed architecture
• Physical simulation
• Haptic simulation
• Real-time visualization.

EADS needed a real-time, open visualization platform to develop applications simply and quickly, and that could interact with the different peripheral devices.

One of SAMIRA II's specifications is to load 3D digital prototypes developed with CATIA V5, to visually and physically adapt them. The system also needed to allow the dynamic environmental configuration, to evaluate alternative simulation scenarios supplied in .xml format.

SAMIRA II is an innovating project for industrial applications, to quickly and seamlessly add new features without additional programming.

The Solution

EADS chose Virtools development and integration platform for the creation of its haptic immersive multi-scenario system. Thanks to Virtools Dev’s open architecture, EADS integrated a modular design and simple interfaces for the different components of their system (behavioral simulators, interaction devices). Furthermore, the Virtools SDK allowed them to develop customized Building Block libraries (BBs), giving developers easy access to their physics simulator's basic functions.

Thanks to the quality and the accessibility of Virtools’ visual programming system, development time was reduced to a few weeks while other traditional solutions would have required months of development. Modular scripts manage each specific entity of the system (physics, data integration, force feedback device) to create a generic system which can be easily modified and re-used for different applications. For example, adding multi-view window in the visualization interface was implemented in only a few hours.

Key Benefits

• Easy integration of external data thanks to the Virtools SDK
• Generic architecture allowing mission planners to define and prepare several scenarios in an accurate virtual environment
• Significantly reduced development time (from 3-5 months to under 5 weeks)
• Link with CATIA V5 numerical models