The research objective of this GOALI award between UNC Chapel Hill and Boeing is to develop novel robot algorithms to generate digital layouts and assemblies of large CAD structures, including the parts and their motion. The underlying research theme is to create novel planning and motion (PLM) simulation algorithms that can accomodate the underlying physical and geometric complexity of large CAD models frequently used in PLM applications. The research will build on recent developments in algorithmic robotics, computational geometry, dynamic simulation, and parallel computing to create efficient methods to perform computations on large CAD structures. This will include novel geometric, planning and simulation algorithms for space utilization, accessibility problems, assembly and disassembly of objects, ergnomics analysis, and other applications. This research is expected to lay the scientific foundation for developing digital environments of large CAD structures that can create a communication "loop back" between design and manufacturing engineers. Furthermore, it will lead to a new set of planning and simulation algorithms that can exploit the computational capabilities of multi-core CPUs and many-core GPUs for fast computations.
If successful, this research would result in new set of algorithms for virtual prototyping, dynamic simulation, robotics, and geometric computing. The proposed work could enable rapid digital prototyping of complex mechanical structure, lower high costs of physical markups, and minimize time loss due to poor design decisions. Furthermore, it could dramatically reduce the rework that may otherwise be necessary during manufacturing. The PIs plan to release new software libraries over the WWW, and expose these ideas to a broader audience by organizing workshops and tutorials. The plausible animations generated by the simulation and visualization tools could have broad appeal to K-12 students and can attract students from other areas to exploit the potential of cyber-infrastructure.
This project has resulted in development of new algorithms for many problems related to CAD (computer-aided design) and virtual prototyping, with focus on large models. These include collision checking, automatic path computation, motion planning of human-like models, GPU-based accelerations, dynamic simulation, etc. This has considerably advanced the state of the art in the field and lead to many new applications. The results from these projects have been published in 27 papers that appeared in various leading conferences and journals, including IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation, Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, ACM Solid and Physical Modeling, ACM SIGGRAPH, Robotics: Science and System, etc. The performance of these algorithms have been evaluated on complex CAD datasets (e.g. 777 model) provided by Boeing. The PIs and Co-PIs from UNC and Boeing also had multiple exchanges related to these technology challenges. Moreover, some of the software packages are available as part of open source packages. This includes the FCL package that is now part of ROS and MoveIT packages and used by a large number of researchers and developers in academic. Many students, working as graduate RAs, received their MS and Ph.D. degrees and are currently working in academic and industrial organizations.
