Driverless Vehicles Move Ahead with FeatureCAM
Kairos Autonomi uses FeatureCAM as a
bridge between the engineer and the mill, allowing them to shorten the
time frame and eliminate false steps.
Kairos Autonomi™, a subsidiary of De-signJug (Salt Lake City, UT), is a pioneering company, helping to create a market that does not exist quite yet. It is part of a small group of independent firms working to develop practical autonomous vehicles, responding to a mandate outlined by the U.S. government for one-third of all wheeled vehicles used by the military in 2015 to be autonomous, or self-driving.
To accomplish this goal in that time period, most of the vehicles will have to be retrofitted. To develop the technology for this—which did not exist anywhere—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense (DoD), hosted a competition called the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005, held on Oct. 8, 2005, in Primm, NV (www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/media.asp). The Grand Challenge 2005 consisted of a 131-mile course in the Mojave Desert, which needed to be completed in less than 10 hours. This field test was intended to accelerate research and development in autonomous ground vehicles that will help save American lives on the battlefield.
DesignJug formed Team Juggernaut to take part in the Grand Challenge. Hay bales proved to be the vehicle’s nemesis and prevented it from finishing the National Qualification Event (NQE) and competing in the final. However, the experience proved invaluable to development at Kairos.1 The result: the technology, which did not exist two years ago, is now usable.
“It’s job passion, not payment, that got the program started,” according to Troy Takach, President and CEO of Kairos Autonomi. The company successfully developed a kit, the Pronto4™, to retrofit existing production vehicles, thereby making them capable of unmanned driving. They developed a solution with “altered thinking”—the company’s catch phrase.
“We saw this as potentially a fairly large market, so we have moved ahead to develop a retrofit kit that can be used on steering-wheel based vehicles,” Takach said. Kairos Autonomi released the product at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International trade show in August 2006. Each kit can be field installed by a trained team in four hours or less.
One of the components in the kit is a steering wheel collar, or actuator, a two-piece ring of aluminum which closes around the vehicle’s steering wheel. Around the inside of the collar are either gears or a sprocket which are used to turn the wheel. The Pronto4™ kit enables existing vehicles to become unmanned systems capable of tele-operational and semi-autonomous travel. “Our ability to spend time on mechanical design and output is really low,” Takach said, “so we need tools that allow us to minimize time on that and spend more time on software development. For this we use FeatureCAM from Delcam.” Sold and supported from the Delcam USA office in Salt Lake City, UT, Kairos uses 3D with solid modeling and feature recognition—the core of the product.
A Perfect Fit
FeatureCAM
fits into the way Kairos develops its ideas. It helps the company
reduce the time to test or market by compressing the development cycle.
Kairos subscribes to what it calls the ‘spiral’ model of development,
which means to push something into existence as quickly as possible and
avoid the discrete steps of research, engineering and manufacturing. It
feels that this approach gets it 80 percent of the way to a complete,
workable concept in 20 percent of the time, producing a design from
which they can iterate. “We use FeatureCAM to help us in this,” Takach
said. “We can literally go from thought to part in 20 minutes.”
FeatureCAM, developed by Delcam, is a suite of CAD/CAM software which
combines cutting edge technology with ease of use. It automates
machining and minimizes programming times for parts on mills, lathes
and wire EDM.
Takach counts on FeatureCAM products to accelerate part programming; the software’s FeatureRECOGNITION helps to automate the process by providing an efficient solution for converting imported 3D CAD models to CNC parts. Features are created directly from solid or surface files. This can include features from milled, turned, four-axis indexing and turn/mill parts. Once a 3D solid model is imported, Automatic Feature Recognition permits programming of 2D parts with a single click. Kairos can create radial, linear, rectangular and point list patterns of features by entering a few additional dimensions.
The steering actuator was designed in FeatureCAM using the solid modeling capability. “We like that we can input a part profile to cut on our Haas Minimill, and FeatureCAM figures out the machine axis moves and tools required to make the part,” Takach said. “This is how we use the core capabilities of the FeatureCAM software. The parametric capabilities of FeatureCAM allow us to quickly make variations of our parts to fit different vehicles.
“We produce STLs (a sterolithography file format) which we send to the Dimension 3D Printer from Stratasys. Then it might go to FeatureCAM, but before they mill it, FeatureCAM will output a STL also to verify the part. We cannot afford to make a lot of wrong parts or to hurt the machine. FeatureCAM lets us assure that the parts are right before the material is ever put on the fixture. Because FeatureCAM is a native Windows program, the look and feel of the software is very intuitive. It also provides automatic selection of tools, feeds and speeds.
“We make a lot of parts that are kind of mundane but very important to our product. Simple, but easy to get wrong, in which case we would use up a lot of time. So we import the DXF file and the feature recognition capability of FeatureCAM sees the features to produce. We really rely on the core set of FeatureCAM functions to keep our manufacturing time as short as possible,” Takach said. “We are almost the antithesis of a machine shop. We have a mill, but we do not want to spend a lot of our time thinking about machining. We think of it as a 3D printer.”
Saving Time While Verifying Part Design
There are several types of parts common to every vehicle kit, but each
has unique features for that vehicle application. Kairos cannot spend a
lot of time redesigning or making the parts, so FeatureCAM is a big
help in saving time while verifying the part design is correct. It is
so reliable and easy to use that Troy has interns using the mill.
Another part Kairos makes is a hyperbolic mirror that it uses to help a vision system see what is around the vehicle. The company uses the Haas Mill to machine the aluminum part—a part that most would put on a turning machine. But with FeatureCAM and some innovative fixturing, Kairos produces a near-perfect, very smooth hyperbolic shape which it then sputters with a reflective coating.
The mill uses a 5C rotary table to provide a fourth axis for machining within a 12" x 16" work envelope. The mill receives the part file directly from the CAD station; no 2D drawings are ever made. Three-dimensional modeling is done in FeatureCAM to check the designs, and sent to the rapid prototype machine or the mill. With FeatureCAM’s inversion tool, Kairos has found a way to machine parts that are larger than the mill’s work envelope: half the part is machined, then flipped and the remaining half is machined.
“We have a standard set of fixtures. If it takes longer than five minutes to setup a part, the engineer is doing the job wrong and we need to think of it in a different way,” Takach said. “This allows us to make 10 different part numbers in a short period of time and get directly to assembly. With FeatureCAM, we have a library of standard fixtures that we can quickly choose from.” FeatureCAM organizes the post parameters in drop-down menus and dialogue boxes, avoiding guesswork in customizing a post. When the NC code is re-posted, the changes are immediately visible on the screen. It’s just as easy to customize manufacturing parameters, tool libraries and feed and speed tables. Customized manufacturing parameters are saved in unique configuration files, so preferred machining attributes can be saved and used for similar types of parts.
A Bridge Between the Engineer and Mill
“FeatureCAM has a big impact on our profitability as a developer
because it saves us time and helps us avoid spending too much time on
non-product development activity. This means we have more resources and
time to put on our main task which is development of autonomous vehicle
systems, which is largely software. This allows us to get farther in
our main task. We think of FeatureCAM as a bridge between the engineer
and the mill which allows us to shorten the time frame and eliminate
false steps.”
With the help of FeatureCAM, driverless vehicles will be coming to a road near you sooner than you think—the result of ‘altered thinking.’
For more information about Feature CAM, contact Delcam (Salt Lake City, UT) at (877) 335-2261 or visit www.featurecam.com. For more information about Kairos Autonomi (Salt Lake City, UT), contact Thomas Grover.
Dave Arnesen works in marketing communications for The Arnesen Company and frequently writes feature case studies for Delcam.
