As part of our Passion for Innovation sponsorship program, Dassault Systèmes partnered with Scoutek and Leeds University, UK, in 2009, supporting the Djedi Robot Mission to explore the mysterious shafts in the Great Pyramid.
If the Passion for Innovation initiative allows us to provide financial support for this innovative project our strength lies, above all, in our ability to add our 3D engineering competency and cutting-edge 3D technology to such missions.
My team and I are proud to be a part of this cross-disciplinary and innovative team, selected by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities to send a robot probe named Djedi into the Queen’s Chamber shafts and explore parts of the Great Pyramid hidden from human eyes for 4,500 years.
Last week stories from New Scientist, Discovery, CNN and others broke the news that the Djedi robot had revealed some previously undiscovered hieroglyphs in one of the shafts and relayed these never seen before images.
These images and mission reports were published in the 84th edition of Annales du Service Des Antiquités de l’Egypte (ASAE), the official publication of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.
The robot has been designed and simulated in 3D to make sure it would work on the field right from the start and would be easily maintained in operations.
But 3D is not only a tool for engineers and we believe that the best way to experience this adventure for yourself is through 3D experiences we are able to deliver. We spent this weekend capturing images in real-time, in a virtual 3D world, to help the public -all publics- understand what the robot has seen.
You’ll see the robot and its environment in full context. Without need for words, you’ll understand the technical challenge as you’ll see Djedi navigate itself through a 20cmx20cm tunnel in the pyramid.
We would like to remind the public that, as exciting as this work is, it is a work in progress. We still have much to learn from Djedi, and Egyptologists still must interpret the meaning and significance of the hieroglyphs.
“Red-painted numbers and graffiti are very common around Giza,” says Peter Der Manuelian, an Egyptologist at Harvard University and a Passion for Innovation partner. “They are often masons’ or work-gangs’ marks, denoting numbers, dates or even the names of the gangs.”
3D has a way of turning question marks into exclamation points, and we enjoy sharing this with you.
Best,
Mehdi
Mehdi is the Interactive Strategy Director at Dassault Systèmes.
