_______________________________ Griffon
Marine
climate. Griffon Marine was able to apply the collaborative development approach refined through the Royal Marines project to this new order. The base hovercraft is a standard platform shared by customers across the world, including Poland, Sweden, Peru, and Colombia, but it is a vehicle that can be extensively reconfigured to suit different operators and environments. For example, Colombia’ s version has an open top to cope with the heat, while Finland’ s is fully insulated for cold conditions. Each country also has entirely different operational requirements, meaning different sensors, system fits, and more.
“ The Finland project allows us to channel all our accumulated expertise and apply it afresh, and we’ re getting the user community directly involved in refining the design,” Mark elaborates.“ To achieve that, we are using VR technology, where everything is built up as a 3D model. Given that we have a production line already running, Finnish operators can put on a VR headset to sit inside an existing hovercraft and see a virtual representation of exactly how their own customized version will look and feel. Rather than interpreting drawings or specifications on paper, they are immersed in the configuration they would get, and we can adjust and move things around in real time until everything is exactly right. It is a brilliant collaboration, with the user, designer and production engineers coming together to make sure that when we actually produce the hovercraft, it meets the customer’ s specific requirements.
“ The hovercraft for our Finnish client is now being built, and they will get their first one delivered later this year. Therefore, we are highly confident that when it arrives, it will be exactly what they want, since they have been involved in the design every step of the way,” he ends. ■
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