AUTOMATED CONCEPTUAL DESIGN OF MECHANISMS

Traditionally, the conceptual design of mechanisms was an art, based p rimarily on the experience of the designer. Today, despite the great a dvances in the science of machine systems, mechanism design is still a mixture of art and science. The basic premise behind this research wa s that experienced designers create complex mechanisms, in part, by co ncocting abstract representations of simpler building blocks. We made attempts to identify a finite set of design building blocks and to rep resent them in a manner that enables a rational, and therefore a compu table, scheme for creation of mechanisms. Based on a systematic invest igation of hundreds of existing mechanisms and machines, we first iden tified a finite set of kinematic building blocks. We then devised a ma trix representation scheme that not only captures the essential nature of the building blocks, but also enables automatic decomposition of a given task into simpler sub-tasks. The matrix representation scheme s erved as a formal means to: (a) represent and reason with the building blocks at different levels of abstraction, (b) generate alternate con ceptual designs, and (c) facilitate rapid simulation of design concept s by readily connecting a series of building blocks. The synthesis met hodology based on the matrix representation was successfully implement ed in a computer program for design of function generating mechanisms. The program takes as input the user supplied specification of input/o utput motion requirements and constraints, and automatically generates alternate conceptual designs.:The matrix representation method and th e automated design procedure are described in this paper, along with a design example. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.