Automation and simulation promise to help manufacturers build facilities and manage their production lines. Hexagon AB today announced that it is working with NVIDIA Corp. to enable multi-user workflows through a unified view for factory planning and design, as well as optimization of process quality and operations.
“Our Hexagon innovation team has been working with NVIDIA to develop opportunities that unite reality capture, AI, simulation, data analysis and visualization with seamless collaborative-planning platforms,” stated Paolo Guglielmini, president and CEO of Hexagon. “With NVIDIA technologies and Hexagon’s Smart Digital Realities, our solutions will deliver real-time comparisons of real- and virtual-world models.”
Stockholm-based Hexagon claimed that it is a global leader in digital reality technologies, combining sensors, software, and autonomous systems. The company said it uses data “to boost efficiency, productivity, quality, and safety across industrial, manufacturing, infrastructure, public-sector, and mobility applications.”
Hexagon has about 24,000 employees in 50 countries and net sales of approximately €5.2 billion ($5.59 billion U.S.).
Digitalization requires accurate digital twins
For businesses to reach the next level of digitalization, they need to create accurate, virtual representations of their physical systems, Hexagon said.
“The $46 trillion manufacturing industry encompasses millions of factories worldwide designing and developing new products,” wrote Brian Harrison, senior director of Omniverse digital twins at NVIDIA, in a blog post.
“Digitalization allows manufacturers to tackle the most complex engineering problems in more efficient, productive ways,” he added. “It also brings industrial businesses one step closer to automating their workflows and becoming software-defined, which means improving operational efficiency and transforming their services with software.”
Hexagon connects platforms to Omniverse
“Through real-time data capture and analyses, Hexagon’s Smart Digital Realities transform digital twins to provide customers with a 360-degree picture of the real world,” asserted Hexagon.
The company is connecting its HxDR reality-capture platform and Nexus manufacturing platform to NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for developing and operating industrial metaverse applications. Omniverse uses open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) plug-ins.
Hexagon is also developing an AI-enabled Web application, based on Omniverse, to allow teams to compare digital twins and their physical counterparts in real time. With more collaborative workflows, enterprises will be able to plan and make decisions more rapidly, no matter where they are, said the partners.
Industrial professionals can use the integrated tools for complex graphics workflows, from virtual prototyping to digital factories, noted Harrison. They will allow developers “to build physically accurate, perfectly synchronized, AI-enabled digital twins that can be used to transform their organizations,” he said.
NVIDIA expects industry benefits
“The Omniverse ecosystem will benefit from Hexagon’s digital reality expertise,” said NVIDIA's Harrison. “Enterprises will be able to easily build, simulate, operate and optimize virtual worlds faster, more accurately, and easier than ever before.”
The integrated platforms will benefit customers in agriculture, autonomous mobility, construction, defense, manufacturing, mining, and smart cities, said the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company.
“Every industry is racing to digitalize their physical processes for the next wave of advanced automation,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology at NVIDIA. “In collaboration with Hexagon, we’ll bridge the gap between the real and virtual worlds — a prerequisite for building digital twins — allowing us to train robots in virtual worlds and bring autonomy to everything that moves.”
At the HxGN LIVE Global event, Hexagon and NVIDIA showed how their integrated offering can help design and engineering teams accelerate their digitalization journeys. The demonstration below showed how they can use Omniverse to quickly aggregate and simulate complex data from Hexagon’s HxDR and Nexus platforms.
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