9634704 Schmidt This award provides funding for a planning project to assess the potential of grammar-based design approaches in the development of designer assistance tools. The project tasks are divided into categories of development and feedback. The development tasks consist of extending work already completed on a graph-grammar design algorithm for the generation of simple rolling carts from small-scale mechanical mechanism components. Devices designed by this grammar can be built, tested and evaluated. The grammar will be augmented to include additional geometric reasoning and extended to a second mechanical design problem. The feedback tasks outlined in this project are established to gain insight from academic and industrial sources on the potential of and requirements for a generative designer assistance tool. Feedback from academic researchers in mechanical design will be gathered from conference presentation of results of using the grammar-based approach to design. Feedback is also needed from future users of designer assistance tools to produce a vision of how generative designer tools can be tailored to meet their needs. Individual meetings to discuss this issue will be conducted with selected area manufacturers who maintain positions in their markets as product innovators. This award will enable researchers to focus future research efforts in development of grammar-based algorithms for mechanical design in ways that will provide solutions to problems of real interest to working design engineers. Devices designed by the graph-grammar algorithm of this project are functioning scale-models of real-world mechanical devices. Therefore, the successful use of the algorithm to generate physically-realized devices lends credibility to the idea of using a grammar to design real-world products. The algorithm refined during this project will then serve as a learning tool and model for the creation of larger, grammar-based systems for product development.
