Medial Zones: Foundations and Engineering Applications

该奖项的研究目标是开发一种全新的方法来理解和建立机械零件的空间特性，这些空间特性与零件功能和制造过程相关。在工程设计的背景下，内侧区的新概念提供了机械/功能特性和空间属性之间的对应关系的明确表示。更确切地说，内侧区提供拓扑有效且参数化的初始设计解决方案。由于事实上，内侧区融合了一些关键的几何和拓扑属性的域本身和它的中轴线，重新制定的问题，内侧区提供？两全其美在各种应用中，如概念设计中的形状合成、机器人和自主导航以及设计自动化。如果成功，这项研究的结果将提供第一个零件组合模型，可用于显式表示形状的机械/功能特征与其空间属性之间的对应关系。这反过来又为自动合成拓扑正确和功能有效的机械设计提供了一个强大的范例。此外，这个新的框架将刺激在康州大学和超越跨学科研究的关键新途径。几何骨架的直观性质将被用作一种工具，以说明在针对K-12学生，教师和当地学区服务群体的有针对性的外展活动中的非直观工程行为，这些群体传统上在工程中代表性不足。

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.