The research objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is to provide a theoretical framework for advancing the state-of-art of the conceptual design of compliant systems. The goal of this work is to (i) develop a kinetostatic synthesis theory for the concept generation of compliant mechanisms, (ii) gain a fundamental understanding of compliant mechanism design problems by seeking their entire solution via computational algorithms based on globally convergent polynomial solvers, and (iii) explore the use of virtual reality (VR) environments for the interactive design of compliant mechanisms. The educational objective is to stimulate the interests of K-12, undergraduate and graduate students in learning engineering subjects through the introduction of virtual reality to different levels of design courses, an Innovation Challenge summer course, and a unique Virtual Reality Demo Day program.
If successful, this research will result in a set of conceptual design tools that overcome the shortfalls of existing approaches and enable the automatic function-to-form transformation in the design of compliant mechanisms. These tools will increase the ability of industry to design high performance compliant machine devices used in the fields of manufacturing, robotics, automobile and defense etc. This in turn will help the U.S. maintain its economic leadership and sustain its share of high-technology jobs. The proposed educational program will change the stereotypical image of engineers in young children, attract more high school students pursuing degrees in engineering disciplines and educate globally competent design engineers for industry.
