This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is to explore the feasibility of developing a product modeling system for sheet metal and associated assemblies. This system, whose domain is the set of non-multi-curved objects, will be used to evaluate products for life-issues, capture designer intentions, propagate those intentions to planning modules, and to generate the necessary process information for manufacture. To accomplish this Geometric Machines Corp. will extend the research on ProMod-S, a sheet metal oriented product modeler developed by their group, which captures the geometric intents of the designer (which are related to the designer's functional intents), and evaluates the product geometry against manufacturing constraints. They will further develop principles and algorithms to capture design intentions, to evaluate designs, and to offer design advice. The capturing of assembly relations to preserve design intent will be accomplished using a spatial relationship kernel developed by their group in an earlier National Science Foundation SBIR grant for a product design system for mechanical assembly. The design rule checker will be developed using the concept of Medial Axis Transform applied to sheet metal design. The mapping of features to the tools and operations which make them and automatic process sequencing will also be investigated. This work will ultimately provide a stand-alone designer system for sheet metal.
