Constraint-Enabled Design Information Representation for Mechanical Products Over the Internet

Global economy has made manufacturing industry become more distributed than ever before. Product design requires more involvement from various technical disciplines at different locations. In such a geographically and temporally distributed environment, efficient and effective collaboration on design is vital to maintain product quality and organizational competency. Interoperability of design information is one of major barriers for collaborative design. Current standard CAD data formats do not support design collaboration effectively in terms of design information and knowledge capturing, exchange, and integration within the design cycle. Multidisciplinary design constraints cannot be represented and transferred among different groups, and design information cannot be integrated efficiently within a distributed environment. Uncertainty of specification cannot be modeled at early design stages, while constraints for optimization are not embedded in design data. In this work, a design information model, Universal Linkage model, is developed to represent design related information for mechanical products in a distributed form. It incorporates geometric and non-geometric constraints with traditional geometry and topology elements, thus allows more design knowledge sharing in collaborative design. Segments of design data are linked and integrated into a complete product model, thus support lean design information capturing, storage, and query. The model is represented by Directed Hyper Graph and Product Markup Language to preserve extensibility and openness. Incorporating robustness consideration, an Interval Geometric Modeling scheme is presented, in which numerical parameters are represented by interval values. This scheme is able to capture uncertainty and inexactness of design and reduces the chances of conflict in constraint imposition. It provides a unified constraint representation for the process of conceptual design, detailed design, and design optimization. Corresponding interval constraint solving methods are studied

Development of an adaptable model for distributed collaborative computer aided design

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN

A review and comparison of ontology-based approaches to robot autonomy

Within the next decades, robots will need to be able to execute a large variety of tasks autonomously in a large variety of environments. To relax the resulting programming effort, a knowledge-enabled approach to robot programming can be adopted to organize information in re-usable knowledge pieces. However, for the ease of reuse, there needs to be an agreement on the meaning of terms. A common approach is to represent these terms using ontology languages that conceptualize the respective domain. In this work, we will review projects that use ontologies to support robot autonomy. We will systematically search for projects that fulfill a set of inclusion criteria and compare them with each other with respect to the scope of their ontology, what types of cognitive capabilities are supported by the use of ontologies, and which is their application domain.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft