BMW Group utilizes NVIDIA Omniverse to create virtual factories, optimizing planning and collaboration, and improving productivity in their manufacturing processes.
BMW Group
Simulation/Modeling/Design
NVIDIA Ominiverse Enterprise
Developers at BMW Group are leveraging NVIDIA Omniverse to architect virtual factories that can be used to optimize production worldwide.
Using Omniverse Code and Kit, the team built an application with customized extensions that unifies data from various digital content creation tools and allows teams to collaborate in real time on factory planning exercises.
There are countless aspects of planning that go into a virtual factory including buildings and structures, vehicles, equipment and kinematics, product and process coupling, logistics, and human simulation. Each of these relies on unique digital content creation (DCC) tools.
With Omniverse Connectors, all of these tools can be brought together to aggregate complex scenes.
Converter microservices automate data ingestion from the various DCC tools that BMW’s team leverages for factory planning. In BMW’s Factory Builder web app, users can select and aggregate source files like CAD Data containing buildings or layouts into a structured USD project that then gets published into Omniverse Nucleus with one click. From here, the factory conductor can adjust the validity of files, update reference files, and make sure projects are up to date. The result is a well-structured, standardized database that factory planners of all technical levels can tap into.
As data from a tool gets automatically converted into USD, BMW users can then publish it to its Metaverse and use it alongside assets from other tools.
OpenUSD, an open scene description used for composing large-scale scenes and virtual worlds, makes this process seamless. OpenUSD is file system agnostic and has APIs for creating, editing, querying, rendering, collaborating, and simulating virtual worlds.
In addition to enabling real-time collaboration between various DCC tools, OpenUSD enables non-destructive assembly of data from numerous sources as individual layers. Different users can modify the factory on different layers at the same time and their edits will not harm the work of others. The stronger layer will win out in composition, but the data from the weaker layer remains accessible.
The whole process of automated conversion to the usd-format is supported by a custom built service that handles the conversion process itself as well as provisioning the data to Nucleus. This is a crucial pillar of the BMW Metaverse and is called the Backend Integration.
Develop industrial metaverse applications with OpenUSD.