YKK AP Technologies Lab to Research Feasibility of a ‘Virtual Factory’ - USGlass Metal & Glazing

YKK AP Technologies Lab (NA) Inc. hopes to make a “virtual factory” that simulates engineering and proviso chains successful a virtual space. The probe and improvement group, a spinoff of Atlanta-based YKK AP Inc., says that the possibilities of a virtual situation tin alleviate workforce shortages and “aging installation technicians” successful the plan and improvement fields.

To execute this goal, YKK AP Technologies Lab precocious signed a five-year lease for 7,576 quadrate feet of probe abstraction connected the 3rd level of RIDC Mill 19, Building A, successful Pittsburgh. The caller determination volition beryllium location to a probe and improvement center. The halfway volition absorption connected processing integer technologies that alteration accumulation and installation activities to beryllium simulated successful a “virtual factory.” Its enactment volition let for the instauration of engineering and proviso chains successful a virtual space, aiming to make a “digital twin,” says YKK AP Technologies Lab.

The quality follows a 2020 probe concern betwixt YKK AP and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) that seeks to wed exertion with the construction, solid and fenestrations industries.

Oliver Stepe, president of YKK AP America Inc., says his institution determined that a semipermanent probe and exertion improvement concern with CMU benefits the commercialized industries. CMU specializes successful applied probe utilizing robots and IT, and its world civilization emphasizes industry-academia collaboration.

The eventual extremity of the concern is to make caller exertion for installing fenestration products astatine occupation sites by utilizing robots and IT to amended operation productivity and quality. Through the agreement, the organizations are investigating virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed world technologies and researching caller installation methods to bring innovation to the field.

“YKK AP is seeing aboriginal constraints connected tract labour not lone successful the U.S. but crossed the globe,” says Stepe. “Increasingly choky schedules, accelerated gathering close-ins and constraints connected skilled tract labour request the improvement of precocious technologies.”

YKK AP researchers are moving with CMU’s Computational Engineering and Robotics Laboratory, led by Professor Kenji Shimada. The five-year concern runs done April 2024; an hold volition beryllium considered aft the concern period.