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Daniel A.McAdams该奖项的研究目标是探索和开发工具，以扩大生物类比在工程设计中的使用。这项研究的结果将使设计工程师能够接触到丰富的优雅和巧妙的方法来解决问题，这些方法自然存在于生物系统中。有几个挑战阻碍了设计者充分利用生物知识领域。第一个也是最大的障碍是，大多数工程师没有足够的生物学知识，无法找到一个类比来开发工程解决方案。为了应对这一挑战，这项研究有两个主要推动力。首先是建立一个词库，将工程学中使用的功能术语翻译成生物学中使用的功能术语。第二是使用新的、新的计算搜索工具来访问生物知识库，以努力挖掘生物系统的功能类比。因此，随着工程师将设计从功能转移到形式，他们可以在自然中搜索形式解决方案。如果成功，这项研究将通过创建仿生设计库和相关的概念生成器来为工程设计做出基础性贡献。主要贡献包括更好的自然语言知识跨域搜索策略，以确定新的生物类比，以及更好的机制，使人们能够理解生物现象，以便更成功地将其应用于解决工程问题。随着研究通过整合在NSF支持的工程虚拟组织中进行，这些仿生解决方案将立即提供给学术界和实践工程设计师。课程开发将为使用这个仿生库生成概念提供一个试验台。

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.