Research On Virtual Environment-based Intend-driven Product Form Design

Traditional Computer-aided Industrial Design(CAID) tools can not completely meet the needs of product styling, partially because of the unintuitive manipulation of control parameters, the other drawback is related to the two-dimensional unnatural human-machine interface supported by desktop system. Taken into account the conditions of computer hardware and software, this paper offered an innovative proposal of virtual environment-based intend-driven product form design system, in order to improve the performance of traditional CAID tools according to designers'psychology characteristic and convention.At the early stage of product development, designers usually have to confront ill-defined problems. Thus form design process is different from routine design, has its specificity. Based on the comparability between product form design and natural evolution, a qualitative analysis of product form design process was developed using protocol analysis, to study the evolving process of problem requirements and solutions, and the interaction between them. Taken this as theoretic foundation, the framework of interactive evolutionary form design system was constructed based on interactive evolutionary computation technology. It instanced in an interactive evolution strategies-based curve modifier (IESCM).Also using protocol analysis, this paper studied how the interactive evolutionary form design process was guided by designers'intent. In order to turn such intent-oriented design process into intent-driven process, adaptive mechanisms of evolutionary computation was used to dynamically capture the design intent during a man-machine interactive modeling process, help designers to find appreciated solution in giant possibilities more quickly. Grounded on this concept, an intent-driven product form design system was built, which was based on adaptive interactive evolutionary computation. And an adaptive interactive evolution strategies-based curve modifier (AIESCM) was given as an instance. In order to find suitable mutation mechanism for interactive evolutionary design, different self-adaptation mechanisms, such as uncorrelated mutation with oneσ, uncorrelated mutation with nσ, 1/5 success rule and 1 /λsuccess rule were respectively applied in AIESCM and were compared. The experiments, which were carried out on comparing AIESCM and IESCM, showed the feasibility and potential of the proposed concept.This paper proposed a concept of immersive modeling based on system integration of virtual reality (VR) and CAID. After studying horizontal coupling and vertical coupling modes of VR-CAID, different integrating methods were researched. Selecting CUBE and 3DS MAX as instances of VR and CAID systems respectively, the integration technology was studied, two prototypes of integration were implemented with CUBE and 3DS MAX. By one method, two systems were integrated in one process at the level of tessellation, which was transmitted through Socket communicating between UNIX and Windows platforms. The other more flexible approach was based on the VRML files sharing. Besides, this paper studied the method of achieving intent-driven product form design based on integrated VR-CAID platform, and built an intent-driven curve modifier based on integrated CUBE-3DS MAX platform.The intent-driven curve modifier was applied to the design of structural characteristic lines of automotive body and to the design of conceptual ship body in the CUBE-3DS MAX platform. The experimental applications demonstrated, the integrated VR-CAID systems can provide designers with an immersive environment, adaptive interactive evolutionary computation-based from design tool can capture the intent of the designer, and accelerate evolving design process. The proposed virtual environment-based intend-driven product form design system can provide better environment to support designers'creative work than traditional CAID tools.