Challenge

  • Rapidly develop and commercialize ultraviolet disinfection technology for disinfecting common handheld items like tools, phones, and tablets to meet market opportunities resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Develop a robotic rock farming system to build and a maintain rock-wall carbon capture system and complete other farming tasks.

Solution

Adopt SOLIDWORKS 3D Sculptor (featuring the xShape app), SOLIDWORKS® 3D Creator (featuring the xDesign app), and ENOVIA® Collaborative Industry Innovator (featuring the Lifecycle app) industrial design, mechanical design, and product life cycle management solutions on the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE® product development platform.

Results

  • Conducted R&D on dual robotic rock farming system in cloud
  • Continued robot development despite  pandemic lockdowns
  • Accelerated robotic rock farming  system development 
  • Reduced development costs substantially
     

An abundance of rock walls crosses the European landscape. There are more than 24,000 miles of rock walls in Ireland alone. NASKA Robotics GmbH has received both European and German government funding to develop its innovative robotic RockFarm system to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere to stem the damaging effects of climate change.

The robots will build rock walls, fill them with rock powder that absorbs carbon dioxide, flush the walls once the rock medium becomes saturated with carbon, and refill the walls with fresh carbon-absorbing rock powder, along with other farm tasks.

NASKA needed a user-friendly mechanical design platform because the design team is primarily software developers—not CAD engineers—writing code to program robots to complete rock-farming tasks with mechanical extensions.

“We needed a design tool that was both easy to use and operated inside a browser in the cloud across our [geographically] distributed team,” notes Dr. Tobias Brett, CEO of NASKA. “We chose the design tools on the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform because they operate the closest to how SOLIDWORKS® works.” NASKA adopted 3D Sculptor and 3D Creator on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform because the tools meet the team’s industrial design, mechanical design, and life cycle management needs and function in a web browser in the cloud.

 

Screenshot of NASKA design on 3DEXPERIENCE platform

 

Related Resources

Perfect Remote Design Solution That Saves Time and Money

When they started in the summer of 2019, NASKA could not have predicted the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform would be the perfect solution, enabling continued development despite the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. 

Because our design tool operates in a browser and our data infrastructure is in the cloud, we’ve avoided the heavy up-front capital investment in hardware that startups have historically faced. We’re saving additional money in the form of time savings … related to our workflow. It gave us a fast start working with colleagues who are not experienced in CAD. If one person becomes a bottleneck, we can quickly hand off some of that work to another team member and eliminate potential delays.

Dr. Tobias Brett
CEO, NASKA
Screenshot of NASKA design on 3DEXPERIENCE platform

 

Scalability of Security as Design Advances

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform also allows NASKA to modulate and scale security. Security was light at the start when the team was investigating concepts. As the design advances, they can protect intellectual property with tighter security protocols.

“The 3DEXPERIENCE platform makes design resilient against any pandemic scenario because even though our offices are closed, the team can continue working remotely from home,” Brett stresses.

 

 

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