Revolutionizing Industrial Automation, SICK Offers Virtual Sensor Solutions Powered by NVIDIA Omniverse

Industrial automation is undergoing a transformative shift with the advent of the industrial metaverse, a 3D virtual environment designed for the design, testing and training of perception artificial intelligence (AI). This is required for the advanced digitalization of industries. Digitalization technologies are reshaping value chains and fostering unprecedented collaboration by interoperating with the broader ecosystem of 3D design tools. Simulation in these virtual environments will play an integral role in this transformation, providing a powerful test bench for training, testing and validation before real-world deployment.

With these capabilities SICK provides customers with the best possible service and consulting experience. SICK is leveraging these emerging opportunities to build smarter services and applications to support customer use cases like application simulation.

Envision the possibility to confirm the functionality of, for example, a robot depalletizing system before any physical interaction with a sensor in the real world. Imagine being able to assess whether the robot is accurately handling its tasks based on the specific model of your robot and the unique setup of your warehouse. SICK has crafted an immersive virtual simulation that allows for this exact evaluation in a depalletizing scenario utilizing three advanced sensor technologies: microScan3, safeVisionary2 and PALLOC-VS.

SICK sensors available in virtual environments

This initiative is a step toward embracing industrial digitalization. With NVIDIA’s advanced simulation technologies, such as the NVIDIA Isaac Sim platform built on NVIDIA Omniverse, SICK can demonstrate, emulate and refine its solutions within a virtual environment. This method greatly expedites the exploration and customization of solutions for clients, delivering tailored results with remarkable efficiency.

NVIDIA Omniverse — a platform of application programming interfaces, software development kits and services for integrating Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) and NVIDIA RTX rendering technologies — acts as a bridge that brings the abstract concepts of immersive industrial digitalization closer to reality. SICK is building on Omniverse to leverage physically based rendering and technologies such as real-time ray tracing to develop comprehensive solutions for a new era of collaboration, solution visualization and more, paving the way toward GPU-accelerated simulation of light-based sensors in dynamic, real-world environments in real time.

The integration of the RTX LiDAR library within NVIDIA Isaac Sim has enabled SICK to virtualize the LiDAR portfolio. Isaac Sim is an extensible robotics simulator that allows the user to design, test and train AI-based robots, and soon, virtual SICK sensor models will be shared with the Isaac Sim user community. For the next Isaac Sim release, users will have access to a set of sensors — multiScan136, picoScan150, TiM781 and microScan3 — that facilitate broader experimentation and innovation across various applications. Today, SICK is working with NVIDIA to leverage the recently announced NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud APIs for distributing virtualized SICK sensor models. This will allow users to easily integrate sensor simulation capabilities into their workflows and applications.

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