Imagination Support for the Mechanical Product Design using Modules by Stepwise Refinement of Design Processes

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The objective of this research is to support the designer's imagination at the preliminary design stage of mechanical products. When the designer makes a first rough design plan at the initial stage, he/she decides on the rough shape and rough dimensions of the functional components of the product, and draws a rough sketch of the product or prototypes. To get the final detailed design of the product, the designer repeats the above design process at an ever increasing level of detail. At the preliminary design stage, it is important for the designer to imagine freely without constraints of preconception. Traditional CAD systems do not support such a divergent thinking process of the designer. In this research, the designer's imagination process is supported by providing various design plans which are automatically created from module layouts. A mechanical product consists of several functional modules, and each module has at least one primitive function. As a mechanism of deployment from functional requirement of a mechanical product to functional modules, a module library is proposed. A module library consists of three classes : the functional requirement class, the primitive function class and the module class. In the module class, each module's layout constraints are described. Mechanical modules which have basic functions to satisfy requirements for the product are chosen and combined using a module library. Various module layouts are automatically generated by applying a genetic algorithm to each of the functional module combinations. The designer knows the rough image of the product based on these layouts. The complete product structure is obtained by connecting modules using connecting parts. Furthermore, a commercially available mechanism-analysis software is applied for determining whether the generated layouts fulfill the functional requirements of the product. A trial implementation of a proposed system is applied to a building kit for toy robots.