The robotic revolution in manufacturing
Manufacturing is an ever-changing industry. Working smarter, faster, limiting costs – that’s an everlasting struggle in manufacturing. Robotization supposes to be the answer. And it is. But, when one thinks about robots, one sees tons of investments, time commitment, resources applied, and expertise needed. And one couldn’t be more wrong! – according to DBR77.
Robot As A Service is their solution! And that’s why they needed us – to build a platform that designs robots’ workstations.
Innovative ideas require bold actions and proper partners! Here, we were introduced by Talent Alpha and joined a web-dev team from AppWorks.
Needless to say, bold actions are always overdue, thus we were all set in a few days from the initial call.
Needless to say, #2, we love that kind of projects and people, where vision runs simultaneously with actions.
Instead of chatting, we established deliverables, communication channel, and responsibilities. Our job was to prepare a WebGL build with Unity3d to connect with the front-end.
The part of the platform under our responsibility was a section where the production line’s design happens. DBR77 is a multiplatform project – works via a web browser. Users don’t need to install anything to visualize their production lines equipped with robots.
With web apps that display 3D models, the biggest challenge is resources. Models – rather large objects – can take time to load. Moreover, users can choose between the options of different models, change them, pick and place them into specified locations, and so on. We created prefabs from provided models and next exported them as separate bundles to protect data and resources. Thus, all the prefabs didn’t download each time the user needed them. They were stored in browsers’ cache.
So, let’s say we had everything under control (did we?). They say that time is relative, and the faster you go, the slower it goes, or something. In our case, time was of the essence! And the principles of the Theory of Relativity didn’t apply here.
Next, we had some issues with a plugin that was chosen. It supposes to speed the work, but this monstrous “thing” slowed us down. Cutting all the unnecessary features (remember: optimization = less is more) consumed time. And don’t forget about the UI – the Unity3d part of the system doesn’t work in a void. All the JSs and other components needed to run smoothly.
And here we are in a place when time is the enemy. We’re exhausted and worried that we wouldn’t make it.
But, wait a minute and think – what can we do.
As I wise man said:” You never fail until you stop trying”, so we tried. We knew the extra pair of hands could do the magic! We found those extra pairs of hands – our Arena by Reality Unit Alumni joined the team to test and shadow our dev.
Fast forward, as everything was rapid in this project, we did it! We delivered! On-time! As requested! As always! 😉
How many mistakes did we make? Too many!
How many of them could we avoid? None!
How many of them are still in a project? None! We cleaned it all. No technical debt – wait until THE END.
If we could change something, what would that be? Nothing!
What was our lesson from the project? That dreams are worth fighting for! A lesson taught us by the CEO of DBR77, Mr. Piotr Wisniewski.
What amazed us in the project? The cooperation between the two companies. Our partnership with appworks.pl is of significance. One day, we could write a book about it.
Today, we have too much time. We feel a little withdrawal. The world is so slow these days. We’d love to sneeze a little into this insane pace…
But, wait, Talent-Alpha says DBR77 wants us again! This time we do it the right way! We start from a pinch of refactoring, next add some new features, and more, and more, but tastefully…
Folks, enjoy our feast at https://platform.dbr77.com/
And refresh the browser…No one ever said that new features could not happen constantly!
The article was written by Bartosz Wloszek – Reality Unit game developer.