To support multidisciplinary communication in VR-based virtual prototyping of mechatronic systems

doi:10.1016/j.aei.2006.05.005

Advanced Engineering Informatics

Volume 21, Issue 2, April 2007, Pages 201-209

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aei.2006.05.005 Get rights and content

Abstract

A typical mechatronic product includes mechanical parts, software techniques, electrical and electronic components. This interdisciplinary character significantly increases the complexity of mechatronic products. Therefore, inefficient communication between the engineers, who come from different domains, becomes one of the main challenges in the development of mechatronic systems. Although, innovations in the field of virtual prototyping can help the engineers to handle a complex system and then accelerate the development processes, the technique itself does not offer a solution to the problem of multidisciplinary communications. In this paper, we present a practical solution of supporting knowledge sharing and communication within a multidisciplinary developing group, whose members need to work cooperatively for doing virtual prototyping of mechatronic systems in VR environment.

Introduction

Modern mechanical engineering systems are based on close cooperation between elements from the areas of mechanics, electronics, control engineering and software engineering. Unfortunately, along with the development of innovative mechatronic products, the complexity of their prototype design manifests in many different ways that slows down the development speed. Typically, the complexity is caused by the increasing number of components to be integrated. The intricate relationships among these elements, especially concerning information processing, might easily exceed the engineer’s imagination. Additionally, the individual parts also incorporate more functions in an increasingly high-integrated package.

Since mechatronic components are related to many different engineering disciplines, cooperation of multidisciplinary design teams is necessary right from the beginning of the design. This brings difficulties to share the knowledge and to communicate within the group.

On the other hand, because the scope of the resulting behavior of the mechatronic system usually cannot be anticipated by the developers, suitable processes and tools are required for rational exploration [1]. These tools are also required for supporting the communication between developers and for presenting the system, which allow the active mechanisms to be visualized and made comprehensible.

In an attempt to cope with the problems of the complexity in the development of mechatronic systems, virtual prototyping is widely used to help the design. It derives from integrated CAD-systems and is enriched with new interaction and visualization technologies, which can help the engineering team to understand the whole design in a more intuitive way. Therefore it is considered as a potential supporting technique for engineering design. However, the technology – virtual prototyping itself does not specified for supporting multidisciplinary communication among the designers, especially for their cooperative work in the development of mechatronic systems.

Our aim is to develop and test new interaction, representation and analysis techniques for composing and verifying mechatronic systems in virtual prototyping environment, especially to support designers to exchange their ideas and knowledge as well as to help them in analyzing the behavioral models of the mechatronic system being developed. The virtual prototyping environment means here an immensive VR environment for doing virtual prototyping, which allows the designer to work more intuitively and interactively than those conventional platforms.

In Section 2, the existing research works, which are focused on supporting knowledge sharing in design or education, are briefly introduced and reviewed. As following, we continue the discussion with the framework of our solution, and explain how a virtual prototype of a mechatronic system can be created from a composition of solution elements. Further, Sections 4 Theoretical basis, 5 System configuration will explicate the supporting techniques and system configuration used in the realization of the multidisciplinary communication, as well as the working flows arranged to fit the communication within the designers in the virtual prototyping environment. Finally, a experimental prototype of our solution is evaluated and illustrated with a practical example in Section 6.

Section snippets

Related works

The problems of multiple users sharing resources, such as information, material, and knowledge, are already known from the field of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) [2], [3], [4]. The research work of CSCW reveals the major challenges in supporting nowadays cooperative activities, which include the distribution of resources, the delegation of rights, and the representation of group structures.

The research works introduced in [5], [6], [7], [8] show that a great interest has aroused

Overview of the approach

A conventional communication for design problem resolving goes through the sequence of “to request, be understood, be answered, to understand and to execute”. Although it is the natural communicating way, it is inefficient. Based on our experience, it is hard or even impossible to let the engineers, who come from different domains, understand each other. The alternative communicating way suggested by our approach is to separate the communicators to “questioner” and “responser”, which is defined

Theoretical basis

It is clarified in the above discussion that, the conceptual framework needs a strong support from the components, in which the multidisciplinary knowledge is encapsulated. Such components can be any kind of knowledge-based ones and the one used in our research work are “solution elements”.

System configuration

The working principles and working processes are the prerequisite condition of sharing knowledge between developers.

Ideally, a new mechatronic system can be assembled from “ready-made” solution elements. However, not every situation can be anticipated by the developers in the mechatronic systems and taken into account in terms of control. That means some components might be inexistent or their attributes might be undetermined in the early design stage. Therefore, they cannot be selected

Evaluation

In order to concretely test the development methodology and environment described, we have replicated the development of a finished mechatronic system in our virtual prototyping environment. The object of our investigation was an innovative mechatronic system – the Triplanar. It is a parallel robot, which was developed at the mechatronics laboratory of the University of Paderborn (MLaP) [16]. It is particularly suitable for our trials because it comprises few mechanical components, though a

Conclusion

In this research, we utilize virtual reality and new interaction techniques to build a creative and efficient cooperative environment for composing virtual prototyping of mechatronic systems. This environment provides friendly userinterfaces to its multiusers, allows them to organize their tasks dynamically, and improves the communication within the different collaborators. This system is still under development and the further work will be focused on extending its ability to fit the design of

Acknowledgements

This work was developed in the course of the Collaborative Research Center 614 – Self-Optimizing Concepts and Structures in Mechanical Engineering – University of Paderborn, and was published on its behalf and funded by the “Deutsche Forschungs-gemeinschaft”.

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