Shipconstructor Software Inc

Shipbuilding CAR-W (Computer Aided Robotic-Welding)

Of significant importance to the U.S. Shipbuilding industry is a widening gap in the use of robotic welding automation versus foreign shipbuilders.  Used heavily on higher volume commercial ship production in other regions globally, automated robotic welding solutions are used sparsely by comparison in the US Defense Shipbuilding Industry.  The result is incrementally higher costs and longer lead times in production. The lack of robotic automation in the US shipbuilding industry has often been attributed to the “programming barrier” where the high cost of staffing for robotic programming creates a cost barrier with weak investment returns on low volume – high mix shipbuilding volumes.  In this integration effort, the foreign technology gap described above closes that process by taking a major step towards solving “the” critical bottleneck to the application of robotic welding technologies in lower volume applications; automated robotic path and process solution generation (i.e., the shift from “manual off-line” to “computer automated robotics” (CAR) programming).Shipbuilding is different from many other industries, such as the automobile industry, in that ships are not mass produced like automobiles. The cost of man programmed robot welding for automobiles can be absorbed more easily because of the number of same robot welds made over and over, and the number of welds are few compared to a ship. In shipbuilding, man programming of the many different welds of a ship get very costly and these costs are hard to absorb when considering the number of welds in a ship and the low volume of the number of ships that will be built of that same design.Additionally, the urgency of this integration in relation to the aging U.S. shipbuilding welder workforce nearing retirement makes this effort critical. These welder's expertise and process knowledge must be captured and documented within the next five to ten years or the risk of losing knowledge and increasing production cost.

ExpressMarine3D to ShipConstructor

Shipyards and Design Agents that employee both Naval Architects and Marine Engineers have always used some rapid modeling naval architect software in effort to get a quick 3D model of a ship hull structure as an initial design. However, typically these early-stage 3D design models are not easily transferable into a detailed 3D production model that can be utilized to manufacture detailed structural components of a ship.This project found a way to pass a rich early phase structure-model to a detail-engineering production tool without losing properties and metadata from an early-stage design tool (ExpressMarine3D) into a detail production design models tool (ShipConstructor and its Marine Information Model - MIM, which is built on top of AutoCAD, and also utilizes Navisworks).In a shipbuilding detail design environment, dedicated tools focus on handling the level of accuracy, versatility and model completeness necessary to produce high quality production support information.   Prior to the shipbuilding detailed engineering, tools for early and basic design must be adapted to handle the rapid changes that are characteristic of the early design phase.

ShipScan

Engineering and design firms, including shipyards, require an accurate and efficient method to survey components, areas and systems to document current as-is conditions. This effort is commonly known as Shipchecking; where several people survey compartments, areas, components, and systems of ships and they physically measure, develop sketches, and take many photographs. A very labor intensive process that is susceptible to errors in capturing as-is conditions is required to update 3D CAD Models.