This Windsor Star article reports Ford Motor Company are using VR to make "bad" assembly line jobs easier and increase quality. From the article: "The same computer simulations that create movie special effects and video games are being used by the Ford Motor Company to make "bad" assembly line jobs easier and increase quality.
Only three years after Ford became the first of the Detroit automakers to employ virtual ergonomics, physically damaging jobs in its plants are gradually disappearing, the company says. And while formerly painful assembly lines tasks are being weeded out, costs are down and quality has soared.
"The impact of this for our workers and our quality is tremendous," says Allison Stephens, a Windsor native who is an ergonomics technical specialist with Ford. "It's really been a huge step for us."
The "virtual assembly" lab run by Stephens has been a major reason the quality of Ford vehicles improved by 11 per cent in the U.S. this year, according to an independent study. The industry average improvement was two per cent for the 2007 model year.
The improvements have been so dramatic that 90 per cent of the company's vehicles are now listed as "average" or "above average" in quality by Consumer Reports, the co-operative testing organization consulted by many buyers before they purchase a new vehicle. Most Lincoln products now top their class, and Ford and Mercury have improved sharply.
Ford has found that making its assembly jobs safer and easier leads to higher quality. For instance, its weather stripping systems:
The rubber gaskets around doors and windows used to pose double-trouble for Ford manufacturing. Installing the pieces used to take such powerful hands that workers' hands became numbed in the short term and damaged over the longer term.
And when assemblers' grips weakened, as was inevitable, vehicles with badly installed weather stripping were shipped. Doors leaked and windows had wind noise. Quality and satisfaction ratings suffered, and so did sales.
The solution - requested by Stephens and her team of mostly University of Windsor-trained human kinetics graduates - was to find a squishier rubber that was easier for workers of average strength to manipulate and compress for installation.
Manufactring engineers were also asked - pre-launch - to redesign the gaskets so they were easier to install. The new channels now "pop" home with little effort.
"That was a real win-win for us" Stephens says. "We made it easier for the operator to put on, and it's a better fit that reduces problems. Is it the best job in the plant now? No," Stephens says of weather stripping. "But we've seen a huge improvement in the number of injuries from that job."
Their system of testing jobs for ergonomic quality is simple in concept. They use motion capture software - the same programs developed by Hollywood and the gaming industry to create CGI effects - to render the movements of assembly workers performing their tasks on a computer screen.
Each potentially stressful task is animated well before each vehicle launch - tight spots, painful reaches, bad lifts or repetitive movements. Now, manufacturing engineers are asked for alternatives before production starts, not afterwards when it's more expensive to find a fix.
"It saves us a whole bunch of time," Stephens explains to visitors to her lab near Fairlane Mall west of Detroit. Virtual ergonomics "gives us real time movement and allows us to evaluate product design before we build it."
Until a few years ago in Detroit, the designs of new cars and trucks were simply handed to manufacturing engineers who were tasked with figuring out how to build them. And during pre-launch training, assemblers had to figure out how to contort themselves to get the job done.
Months later, the union would start complaining about the "bad" jobs, and engineering would resist expensive changes that would ruin their cost estimates.
It often took injuries, grievances or a history of people calling in "sick" on certain jobs before companies fixed the problems. "There were some awful jobs for a long time," says Stephens, a University of Waterloo kinesiology graduate.
Helping Stephens and her team are two digital mannequins: Jack, a male simulation which is configured with extremely large hands, is used to test clearances inside a car being assembled; and Jill, a female assembler configured to rank in the lowest 25 percentile for female strength, is used to measure the power and the reach required for each job.
If Jill can lift the part and reach the job, and Jack can fit the part into the aperture, that means 90 per cent of all autoworkers can perform the task.
The simulations are created by attaching electronic markers to a real human being, who simulates the movements of potentially problematic tasks in the lab while working on a universal prop, which stands in for the car on the assembly line.
A set of special goggles gives the human guinea pig a view of a "virtual car" he is pretending to build, rendered in colour-coded parts.
Fifteen cameras encircling the human model and the simulated vehicle record their every movement to within one centimetre. The movements are later translated by computers into the animated movements of Jack and Jill.
Supervising the animation process is yet another Canadian: Jim Chiang of LaSalle. A Windsor kinesiology grad, 35-year-old Chiang also has a master's in bio mechanics from Guelph.
A byproduct of virtual assembly modelling has been reduced tooling costs and fewer last-minute redesigns for engineers. A job change used to cost tens of thousands of dollars after "design freeze," when a new vehicle and its thousands of parts are given final approval.
Now, potentially damaging jobs are ruled out by Chiang and Stephens, and engineers have been finding alternatives at little or no cost before production starts.
Prior to virtual ergonomics, most launches had over 100 assembly "issues" per vehicle. For the new F-150 pickup truck about to launch next year, the number of issues is already down to five.
Engineers, who previously opposed design or job changes, are now cooperative, Stephens says. "It's gone over very well with the engineers. They know they'd have to redesign it anyway if the operators can't get it on.""