The research objective of this award is to enable designers to develop 3D product forms through a sketch-based modeling interface, while allowing them to seamlessly manage and accommodate known engineering constraints. This research will result in new methods for conceptual design in which the unguided exploration activities necessitating tedious downstream efforts are replaced by a set of guided, yet free-form design activities. By allowing engineering constraints to be considered concurrently with form generation, the proposed study aims to make product design significantly more streamlined, focused, and efficient, while minimizing costly post-design efforts. The primary research task and the resulting contribution will be a suite of novel computational techniques and associated software that enable conceptual shape creation and exploration in the presence of dimensional, layout, and ergonomic constraints.
If successful, the results of this research will enhance current design practices by allowing important design criteria to be managed and applied concurrently with conceptual form design. This, in turn, will help alleviate many of the costly conflicts that are likely to occur in the current design settings. This effort will also enhance the infrastructure for human-centric design research and education by establishing a practical sketch-based 3D design platform, requiring little or no solid modeling expertise. The investigators will mentor undergraduate students on independent research projects and make the resulting software available in the design courses they regularly offer in their institutions. Finally, the novel interactive features of the proposed system will be used to engage non-engineers and K-12 students with engineering and technological innovation through educational and outreach programs.
This work developed new technologies to improve digital shape design activities in industrial product design environments. Specifically, the work developed a new computational method geared toward the conceptual phases of the design process by making engineering constraint information available and manageable at such early stages. This new capability helps industrial designers generate and explore technically sound concepts more expeditiously, thereby enhancing overall design cycle and product quality. The work developed mathematical foundations and implemented algorithms for a sketch-based shape design platform capable of accommodating aesthetic, ergonomic and dimensional constraints. The research: (1) Developed theoretical foundations for sketch-based shape design under constraints, (2) Implemented the theoretical formulation in 2D and 3D software suites, (3) Demonstrated and evaluated the effectiveness of the work through user studies. Various variational design algorithms and streamline-based feature generation methods have been used to develop and deploy software. The resulting software significantly alleviates the challenges with conventional shape design and editing techniques, and makes such tools accessible to those who may not have the expertise in computer modeling. The products are freely accessible on PI Kara’s academic website: http://vdel.me.cmu.edu Details: This research established the theoretical foundations for a conjoint management of aesthetic and engineering constraints. The key challenge addressed was the prevalence of nonlinear constraints and objective functions that prevented the use of conventional energy-minimization methods. Instead, new algorithms involving non-linear objective functions and constraints were devised that perform at interactive rates. Additionally, it is shown that various aesthetic features can be readily formulated through the use of a non-isotropic, pseudo material field to enable smooth and aesthetically pleasing shape deformations while satisfying engineering constraints. In design intention and constraint preservation for direct modeling of 3D freeform surfaces: A novel 3D surface editing system has been developed capable of jointly accommodating aesthetic design intentions expressed in the form of surface painting and color-coded annotations, as well as engineering constraints expressed as dimensions. This system is geared toward early conceptualization in industrial design that heavily involves product shape tuning and the explorations of many alternatives. It is shown that the ability to preserve design intentions narrows down the space of the shapes resulting from deformations, and assists the designer in the shape exploration by eliminating the manual preservation of desired aesthetic features. The preservation of dimensional constraints introduces engineering considerations early in conceptual design to facilitate its negotiation with aesthetics. In streamline-based form feature design: A novel approach for designing streamline-based, free-form surface features has been developed in the context of product design. The technical contributions include the construction of smooth surface editing handles through the interactive prescription of characteristic streamlines, a fast, linearized technique for fine-tuning the alignment of the field guided parameterization, and a streamline-based curvilinear scaffold for unprojecting shape editing sketches and driving 3D freeform feature creation. Impact: The techniques that were developed allow free-form surfaces to be edited while providing the ability to impose positional and dimensional constraints on them. This key capability was next extended to concurrently incorporate layout, ergonomic, and aesthetic constraints in product design. Additionally, a number of new algorithms stemming from this work have been developed. These works collectively make contributions to engineering, computer science, and computer graphics.
