Development of an interactive, object-oriented sketching system for mechanism design

A highly interactive and flexible mechanism design system has been developed by using object-oriented analysis and design techniques. The system automates the mechanism sketching process and provides flexibility to allow a designer to adjust the geometric representation of a mechanism according to a designer's intent.; An attempt has been made to apply linear system theory to numerically represent a mechanism. The modified adjacency matrix expressed in linear vector space provides tools for manipulating features of kinematic connectivity of a mechanism through numerical computation rather than symbolic manipulation, and results in improving the efficiency of the design process for mechanism synthesis. The object-oriented data structure, which is the creation of highly modular mechanical components, was created to support the geometric representation of link objects using the geometric link creation method of link. A feature-based approach has been employed to efficiently deal with kinematically interdependent relationships in a mechanism. A concept of variational geometry has been incorporated into the object-oriented geometric modeling of links, which allows a designer to deal with flexible shape generation and manipulation. Flexibility is needed by a designer to be able to adjust geometry features of a sketched mechanism. This flexibility has been accomplished by introducing a basic framework for representing links in the computer with a combination of first-order predicate logic, constraint propagation and an object-oriented method.; The functionality of the developed system has been demonstrated by several examples from realistic mechanism designs. The system provides feasibility for sketching a variety of mechanisms, which include revolute, prismatic as well as high-order joints, such as cam and gear, as well as a highly interactive MS-Windows environment.