In the course of 2012 summer games in London, engineers continually look for new refinements that propel the competition to a new level. One of the objectives was to find a better “fitout” of kayakers in the canoe slalom. Fitout means building custom parts of foam and wood for the seat of the craft. It sounds like a simple matter of measurement and cushioning, but in the slalom, fitout gives the competitors an especially crucial edge.
A good fitout allows the athlete to use their full range of motion while transferring as much force as possible into the water. Past methods of fitout have been laborious and the results are not easily repeatable. “There can be a frustrating process of trial and error and wasted material before you get it right,” Ami Drory, biomechanist at the Australian Institute of Sport, says. His goal was to develop a reliable and repeatable series of digital procedures that would start with real forms of boat and athlete and end with manufactured parts. He enlisted the help of a Canadian, Sébastien Dubois, an application specialist from the Quebec City-based scanner developer Creaform.
Dubois brought one of Creaform’s portable handheld laser scanners, the REVscan, to the AIS facility in Brane. The REVscan is a lightweight handheld 3D scanner. It is perfect for organic shapes such as human bodies, and generates industrial level accuracy results.
Scanning kayaker Jessica Fox in position wearing a webbing of point markers, Dubois and Drory created the initial digital test model. The scanning equipment, featuring TRUaccuracy technology (which ensures highly-accurate measurements, regardless of the environment) mapped 3,500,000 polygons-worth of 3D points in about an hour. Another thorough two-hour scan captured the interior of Fox’s competition kayak.
Using Creaform’s VXelements software, Dubois produced STL polygonal data files of the scans which were imported into Geomagic Studio. Both Fox’s body scan and the kayak scan were processed through Geomagic’s system where they could be saved as IGES data for import into SolidWorks. Once in the CAD system, Boolean operations on the data could be used to enable precise modeling of the kayak fitout, customized perfectly to the athlete’s unique body shape. Using this process, Dubois scanned and processed 11 athletes’ scans in 3 days.
Read the whole article on http://geomagic.com/en/community/case-studies/kayak-slalom-presents-olympic-engineering-challenge.
Scanning with the Creaform REVscan to get the lower body shape of Jessica Fox.
3D NURBs model of the athlete ready to be used in CAD engineering processes
The athlete's scan and the kayak model together.
Author: Geomagic
Source (text and images): http://geomagic.com/en/community/case-studies/kayak-slalom-presents-olympic-engineering-challenge