The research objective of this award is to develop a fundamentally new approach to understand and establish spatial properties of mechanical parts in terms of simple interacting constructs related to part functionality and manufacturing processes. In the context of engineering design, the novel concept of a medial zone provides an explicit representation of the correspondence between mechanical/functional characteristics and spatial properties. More precisely, medial zones provide topologically valid and parameterized initial design solutions. Due to the fact that the medial zones fuse some of the critical geometric and topological properties of both the domain itself and of its medial axis, reformulating problems in terms of medial zones affords the ?best of both worlds? in a variety of applications such as shape synthesis in conceptual design, robotic and autonomous navigation, and design automation.
If successful, the results of this research will provide the first combinatorial model of a part that can be used to explicitly represent the correspondence between mechanical/functional characteristics of shapes and their spatial properties. This, in turn, provides a powerful paradigm for automatically synthesizing topologically correct, and functionally valid mechanical designs. Furthermore, this new framework will stimulate critical new avenues of interdisciplinary research at UConn and beyond. The intuitive nature of geometric skeletons will be used as a vehicle to illustrate non-intuitive engineering behavior during targeted outreach activities to K-12 students, teachers and local school district serving groups that have traditionally been underrepresented in engineering.
