SIMULATION
ArcelMittor’s foundries can be visited by trainees, but using VR goggles instead of entering a hazardous site in-person.
hooks and lift steel ladles; he or she must follow a precise procedure that complies with the safety rules specific to the company’s industrial sites. In the event of errors, everything is recorded in the application and sent to a platform where all the trainees’ results are collated. This application is designed to be driven by a human trainer who assesses the trainees’ bridge-handling skills. The trainer sees a different display from the trainee, and can see in real-time the mistakes made by the user. “The training simulator we made for ArcelorMittal was very successful,” says CEO Matthieu Bracchetti. “Now we are developing another complete new range of crane simulator, with new scenarios and new cranes. “We create simple day-to-day scenarios for the trainee, but then we can add in other scenarios where incidents happen – emergencies, people walking underneath the load, things like that – and we monitor the reaction of the students and everything that happens during the scenario. Have they got good reflexes? Do they follow the rules?” So is the monitoring done automatically by the software
or is there an instructor standing by the student to record how he performs? “That question is important,” Bracchetti says. “Everything is automatically recorded, all the mistakes that are made. There is AI inside the software analysing all the behaviour of the student; but we always like to have an instructor beside the student who has the final decision. “So he might say, ‘Yes, you failed to see that obstacle, but I was talking to you at the time and distracting you, so let us take that into consideration.’ We always give the primary power to the instructor, to validate or cancel the simulation model. The same exercise can be repeated several times. If the student gets it wrong the first time, exactly the same incident can be replayed until he knows how to avoid this kind of problem. It is tricky to reproduce the reality of what will actually happen with this kind of simulator, from the physical behaviour of the crane, the sway of the load, to how much the crane accelerates when the control button is pushed. The surroundings also need to be modelled accurately,
24 | April 2026 |
www.hoistmagazine.com
explains Bracchetti. “If the client is a steel foundry wanting to train its operators we will want to model how high the loads are lifted, whether the furnaces are on the right-hand side of the factory or the left, how far it is to the place where the metal is poured into the moulds, and so on. “So the first thing we do when we receive a commission
is to visit the client’s factory and make a high-resolution 3D scan at high texture. That will be our reference when we make our digital model. But we also record all the actions and instructions of the people using the crane. We ask them questions, we follow them through the day, they explain all the detailed knowledge that they have acquired through experience. Our part, the magic that we do, is to convert the scan, add in the knowledge of these experienced people and mix it also with the crane’s performance date and with the engineer who actually works on that crane. All of those go to make your simulator. This method works in many other sectors too, such as the medical sector training surgeons for operation. “Whatever the application, when we are asked to make a simulator our first question is always, ‘Where is the expert, the person who does these things all day every day in real life?’” continues Bracchetti. “We can supply very simple hardware, modelling a
standardised generic type of crane displayed on a pair of virtual reality goggles with a pendant or bellybox controller and a tablet or laptop to pilot your session. That way is very affordable, only a few hundred euros, so even a small company with only one crane can afford it. “But our niche market is for tailor-made applications, because we know that every company has its own rules. We can recreate their control cabin and levers exactly; and we can exactly model their plant setup and crane. At a certain point you have the golden rules that are the same for everyone, but every company also has its own protocols and rules and procedures, and we can programme those in as well. We like to go deeper into the details that the customer wants. We personalise it so they can train even more efficiently.”
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79
