A paper presented by the Digital Engineering Research Group in Heriot-Watt's Institute of Mechanical, Energy and Process Engineering has won a prestigious best paper award at the ASME 2013 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences' Computers and Information in Engineering Conference in Portland, Oregon, USA.
VADER system
Entitled 'The Evaluation of a Virtual Aided Design Engineering Review (VADER) System for Automated Knowledge Capture and Reuse' this work demonstrates the team's successful application of an intuitive virtual reality interface for the capture and reuse of engineering knowledge and rationale.
Knowledge capture/reuse is a key challenge in engineering and other industries. Current manual methods are costly, time consuming and potentially capture the wrong data due to human error and poor knowledge relationship formalisation. Companies require low cost, fast, automated engineering knowledge acquisition for current and future product development and training.
Evaluated by industrial project partners from major UK and international companies - including aerospace, shipbuilding, construction and defence firms - VADER automatically and unobtrusively captures multimodal user exchanges during design reviews. By processing the captured data, review reports and records are automatically generated allowing fast product/activity knowledge retrieval.