Qualitative Kinematic Simulation for Verification of Function of Mechanical Products

Mechanical conceptual design mainly deals with insufficient and qualitative information on mechanical products to be designed. To build a useful environment for supporting designers at the conceptual design stage, methods and computational tools are needed for representing and reasoning about such information with defects. The focus of this paper is on representing and reasoning about the geometry and motion of physical objects, with only incomplete and qualitative information at hand. Such information includes shape, spatial relation and possible motion patterns, etc. A new concept, called qualitative spatial relation space (abbreviated as QSRS), is put forward to describe mechanisms of mechanical products by referring to the qualitative spatial relations between their components. Based on QSRS, a qualitative kinematic simulation system has been implemented to enable verification of the mechanical function of products at the conceptual design stage. The system can derive motions of components caused by other components' specified motions from the qualitative structural descriptions of products, and put a brief and comprehensible interpretation on the mechanical functions of products.