CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
29 June 2007
Implementation Investments
Delcam's FeatureCAM Takes Kairos From Thought to Part in 20 Minutes
Delcam's FeatureCAM feature-based CAM software is helping Kairos Autonomi, a developer of retrofit kits for autonomous vehicles, to compress the development cycle for its new designs. "With FeatureCAM, we can literally go from thought to part in 20 minutes," said Troy Takach, President and CEO.
Kairos is responding to a need, outlined by the US government, for one-third of all 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, prompting Kairos to develop a kit to retrofit to existing production vehicles, such as Jeeps and Nissans. Each kit can be field-installed by a trained team in four hours or less.
"We make a lot of parts that are kind of mundane but easy to get wrong, in which case we would use up a lot of time," explained Mr. Takach. "So we import the DXF file and the feature-recognition capability of FeatureCAM sees the features we need to produce. We really rely on FeatureCAM to keep our manufacturing time as short as possible."
There are several types of parts common to every vehicle kit but each has unique features for that application. Kairos cannot spend a lot of time redesigning the parts, so the parametric capabilities of FeatureCAM allow variations to be made quickly.
"With FeatureCAM, we have a library of standard fixtures from which we can choose. If it takes longer than five minutes to set up a part, we need to think of it in a different way," Mr. Takach said. "This allows us to make ten different parts in a short period of time and get them directly to assembly." In addition, 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 turned over and the remaining half is machined.
"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 software systems. 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."
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