| |
 |
|
Using SolidWorks
Office, ASI engineers developed the robotic arms for NASA’s Mars
Exploration Rover (MER) mission. View
video. |
 Alliance
Spacesystems, Inc. (ASI) designs and manufactures mechanical systems,
robotics, structures, and mechanisms for spacecraft and scientific instruments,
including the robot arms used on “Spirit” and “Opportunity,”
the two rovers developed by NASA for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER)
mission.
When ASI began
operations in 1997, the founders knew they needed a powerful yet flexible
3D CAD system to develop highly precise, complex mechanisms and collaborate
with scientists and NASA mission planners, according to Brett Lindenfeld,
director of engineering. “We looked at all the high-end CAD tools,
but when we looked at SolidWorks® software we immediately recognized
a trailblazing software product,” Lindenfeld recalls.
“SolidWorks
combines the functionality of high-end CAD with an open architecture,
ease-of-use, and access to a fully integrated set of add-on solutions
to provide a complete and seamless desktop engineering system. There are
no other tools that can do what SolidWorks does for the price, which was
why we chose it at the very beginning.”
Overcoming time and resource challenges
The SolidWorks Office mechanical design solution proved to be the right
choice on numerous projects, Lindenfeld notes, but really showed its value
during the development of robotic arms for NASA’s Mars exploration
rovers, which provided the first opportunity for detailed scientific studies
on Mars.
“Working with a team of eight people – a project manager,
five design engineers, and two analysts – and facing incredibly
challenging design constraints – including the low pressure on Mars,
temperature swings from -100 to 30 degrees Celsius, the shock of landing,
and restrictive space and weight requirements – we had to deliver
these arms in just 18 months,” Lindenfeld explains. “Because
we did not have a 100-person group and unlimited resources, we had to
pursue an aggressive design process that was unlike anything we had ever
done.
“I don’t think this project would have been possible without
SolidWorks Office and its integrated tools, such as COSMOSWorks™
analysis software,” he adds. “Each arm has about 1,000 parts,
including 300 custom parts, and at any given point we were working with
as many as 50 different configurations. We needed a seamless, paperless
concurrent design approach, and considering the timeframe and scale of
the effort, there was no CAD system other than SolidWorks that would have
enabled us to succeed.”
Integrated tools boost design quality and innovation
Using SolidWorks Office, ASI accelerated design iterations and used integrated
COSMOSWorks analysis capabilities to resolve problems and make the overall
design more innovative and robust.
“We were
searching for every gram of weight, every millimeter of space,”
Lindenfeld explains. “The ability of our analysts to use COSMOSWorks
for stress and thermal analysis enabled them to backstop our designers
and collaborate efficiently to optimize the design. The team was able
to reduce the mass of the robotic arm by 20 percent, the automotive equivalent
of the space needed for a car engine and transmission, while keeping rework
to less than one percent. We were fast but still produced a higher quality,
more innovative design.”
 |
|
Design communication tools within SolidWorks Office enabled
the ASI team to produce an innovative, robust design under a compressed
schedule. |
Paperless communication streamlines development
The versatile capabilities and open architecture of the SolidWorks Office
suite helped ASI to finish the project with a completely paperless design
documentation system.
In addition
to leveraging automatic drawing creation capabilities of SolidWorks software
and animation and communication capabilities in SolidWorks Animator and
eDrawings™, ASI tapped the SolidWorks application programming interface
(API) to develop a PDF file creation and communication tool to drive the
review and approval process.
The solution
was so effective that ASI spun off a separate company, Bluebeam Software,
Inc., to develop and market its Bluebeam Pushbutton PDF™ paperless
workflow solution.
“SolidWorks Office gave us the ability to work with a truly paperless
workflow,” Lindenfeld says. “The open SolidWorks API enabled
us to develop an application that made the PDF file format our primary
documentation tool. The flexibility of SolidWorks allowed us to use whatever
communication format was required. We used SolidWorks models as well as
PDF and eDrawings files – whichever format best suited the needs
of each member of the development team.”
Lindenfeld adds that eliminating paper documentation kept the project
on track and streamlined design communications, reviews, and approvals.
“This project was all about working within a tight schedule. Using
SolidWorks, we were able to complete mssioncritical tasks in hours instead
of weeks,” he notes.
|
