Our Top 3 Takeaways from Emulate3D UGM 2026

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to attend Rockwell Automation's Emulate3D UGM event in Salt Lake City. It was a very informative conference with some great presentations from many of our colleagues. Below is an audio blog (and transcript) outlining my thoughts on some of my favorite presentations at the event.

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In early February, we joined about 75 other power users of Emulate3D in Salt Lake City for a threed ay event to share stories, network, and learn about some new features. It'sone of the events that I've been attending since about 2013. It's a great event and I enjoy going every year, and my favorite part is hearing stories fromother users.

So we can incorporate some new ideas into our practice. So I wanted to share my top five favorite client presentations from the user group meeting. And starting with number five is from Paul Christensen, who is a newcomer to the Emulate3D conference. But he gave a couple really cool presentations and the first presentation he gave was about training, [00:01:00]computer vision using NVIDIA's Omniverse and E3D.

So, Paul is from a company called Project Binder which is out of Denmark. And his presentation, like I mentioned, focused on training vision systems to detect anomalies. And they were doing that for vaccine vials, so some very high precision a lot on the line type of type of testing.

It was very cool.So ,his team used Emulate3D to create known flawed vials. And then used high quality renderings from NVIDIA's Omniverse through a connection to basically train the computer vision model on what bad vials looked like and what good vials looked like. And then once it's trained, his team could basically testhow well the computer vision predicted anomalies, make tweaks to the computer vision system and continue iterating until they got something they were comfortable with.

The best part of his presentation, I thought was how it removed a ton of [00:02:00] critical time and energy and product in the field that would otherwise be required. So, of course you're always going to have things in the field that need to be tweaked. But I thought this methodology was one that seemingly saved a considerable amount of time and effort and.

Apparently proved to be very valuable to his client, so it was an excellent presentation fromPaul. Number four was one that focused on saving hundreds of thousands of dollars during a startup. So, Sean Cheney was from Pearson Packaging and he's been a regular at UGM, and he was kind enough to share a story about one of his high value clients who had a really complex packaging application.

I wanna say it had a, at least a couple, if not a few robots. And Sean's been an evangelist for along time. And as part of his presentation, he showed how they. Found several opportunities for improvement in their design and many of which were revealed using the high-powered physics engine with Emulate3D [00:03:00].

He really put our math skills to the test, but by our collective estimation using these tools helped his client and his team save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars during real world commissioning by avoiding. Downtime, which could otherwise be used as productive time. So I thought it was a really cool presentation from Sean.

Number three was from Eric and Scott from Honeywell. Eric and Scott are also veterans of the UGM conference, and I always enjoy catching up with them. This year they gave a really awesome presentation on how they drastically reduced the re the lead time from concept testing to simulation testing all the way to emulation in a matter of minutes.

Being at Honeywell, they can take advantage of their refined standards to build automations that absorb some of their data and then allow Eric and Scott's team to basically automate a lot of the configuration process. Of their tools. They also demonstrated a [00:04:00] tool that they developed to help look for anomalies or errors in some of their standard internal engineering deliverables, which apparently according to them and I believe it for sure.

Has helped them capture potentially big issues that would've otherwise been overlooked through,a lot of these big, deep complex documents. So it was just a really neat presentation from Eric and Scott. Number two was from Saab, from Amazon. Saabgave two really cool presentations, but my favorite was, they were both my favorite, but the first one was an automated way to test for shoot design forproduct handling issues. So essentially what SAR and his team did was build acloud-based tool that had Emulate3D in the backend, and it allowed users to runthousands of randomly generated packages.

That the user could configure down some potential or some perspective [00:05:00] shoots. And really what they were looking for is to see how well would the packages be handled. What was the rate of mishandling packages? Would they fall off where they weren't supposed to create jams? LikeI said, he and his team created this tool that he could deploy, I assume internally to his team and allowed them to test for issues.

But I think the coolest part. Of this was that his tool at the end of a run would export pictures and videos of what happened. So if there was a product handling issue, maybe, an hour and a half into his run he developed a tool that would basically detect that, take pictures of what happened, and in some cases export videos ofwhat happened too.

So, somebody wouldn't have to, manually recreate that instance. His second presentation was also our really neat application. It was a computer vision application where he and his team basically used high resolution images to test and train a new high speed simulator [00:06:00] without really requiring any real world product.

So, basically what happened was is they were taking pictures of packages as they passed into this simulated high-speed singulator. Those images were relayed to actually a MATLAB instance where there was some complex trigonometry algorithms going on, and then it reported back to Emulate3D in nearly real time, but certainly fast enough todo it in real time with instructions on how to adjust belt speeds such that packages got rotated properly, singulated properly, and basically moved in two dimensions such that they could be handled downstream.

He and his team were able to develop and engineer this new concept really quickly, really cost effectively and seemingly again, without having to to do that kind of testing in the real world. And then my favorite presentation, or at least number one on this list was from Andy Cannon from a TC and Laura [00:07:00]Green from Hire which is GE Appliances.

So this was a really awesome presentation because it included both the supplier. And the enduser as presenters. They demonstrated several applications of automating assembly lines for household appliances like dishwashers, and I was especially impressed with how open and receptive both a TC and GE were to changes.

Often times, simulation and virtual commissioning calls out issues that may reflect poorly on engineering teams. But everybody's human and everybody makes mistakes. And really what this technology allows us to do is find those issues sooner, iterate faster, and ultimately deliver high quality automated systems that workf or a long time.

So I could go on and on about the presentation and how much I loved it but just one technical point to finish out. I, there was a really cool part of their presentation where Andy's team found an issue with [00:08:00]how items were being packed into a tote container. Basically dropping in from a conveyor belt, and his team realized that adding vibration to the tote would permit the items to settle and collect more efficiently, thus increasing the number of items that could fit into the tote and reducing the number that ended up on the floor.

So it was just an awesome display of technical expertise and high powered physics engines from Emulate3D.So as you could tell, it was a great conference. I had a great time and I appreciate you watching, and we'll see you next time.

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