Collaborative Research: A Biomimetic Concept Generator for Engineering Design

协作研究：工程设计的仿生概念生成器

• 批准号: 0800772
• 负责人: Daniel McAdams
• 金额: $ 25.49万
• 依托单位: Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-06-01 至 2013-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0800772&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Biomimetic; Concept; Generator

Collaborative Research: A Biomimetic Concept Generator for Engineering DesignDaniel A. McAdamsThe research objective of this award is to explore and develop tools that will expand the use of biological analogies in engineering design. The results of this research will enable design engineers to access the wealth of elegant and ingenious approaches to problem solving that are found naturally present in biological systems. There are several challenges that prevent designers from taking full advantage of the biological knowledge domain. The first and most significant obstacle is that most engineers do not have sufficient knowledge of biology to identify an analogy from which to develop an engineered solution. To address this challenge, this research has two main thrusts. The first is the creation of a thesaurus that translates the terminology of function as used in engineering to the terminology of function as used in biology. The second is the use of novel, new computational search tools to access repositories of biological knowledge in an effort to data mine biological systems for functional analogies Thus, as engineers move a design from function to form, they can search nature for form solutions. If successful, this proposed research makes fundamental contributions to engineering design through creation of a biomimetic design repository and associated concept generator. Key contributions include better cross-domain search strategies on natural-language knowledge to identify novel biological analogies, and better mechanisms to enable understanding of biological phenomena so they can be more successfully applied to solve engineering problems. The biomimetic solutions will be immediately available to both academia and practicing engineering designers as the research is performed through integration in an NSF supported Engineering Virtual Organization. Curriculum development will provide a testbed for using this biomimetic repository for concept generation.

合作研究：工程设计的仿生概念生成器。该奖项的研究目标是探索和开发将扩大生物类比在工程设计中的使用的工具。这项研究的结果将使设计工程师能够获得在生物系统中自然存在的优雅和巧妙的解决问题的方法。有几个挑战，阻止设计师充分利用生物知识领域。第一个也是最重要的障碍是，大多数工程师没有足够的生物学知识来确定开发工程解决方案的类比。为了应对这一挑战，这项研究有两个主要目标。首先是创建一个同义词词典，将工程中使用的功能术语翻译为生物学中使用的功能术语。第二种是使用新颖的、新的计算搜索工具来访问生物知识库，以便对生物系统进行功能类比的数据挖掘。因此，当工程师将设计从功能转移到形式时，他们可以在自然中搜索形式解决方案。如果成功的话，这项研究通过创建仿生设计库和相关的概念生成器，为工程设计做出了根本性的贡献。主要贡献包括对自然语言知识更好的跨域搜索策略，以识别新的生物类比，以及更好的机制，使生物现象的理解，使它们可以更成功地应用于解决工程问题。仿生解决方案将立即提供给学术界和实践工程设计师，因为该研究是通过整合到美国国家科学基金会支持的工程虚拟组织中进行的。课程开发将提供一个测试平台，使用这个仿生知识库的概念生成。