VRMDS: an intuitive virtual environment for supporting the conceptual design of mechanisms

  • Authors:

  • Juan Camilo Alvarez;Hai-Jun Su

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Maryland Baltimore County, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 1000 Hilltop Circle, 21250, Baltimore, MD, USA;University of Maryland Baltimore County, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 1000 Hilltop Circle, 21250, Baltimore, MD, USA

  • Venue:
  • Virtual Reality - Special Issue on Manufacturing and Construction
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

This paper presents Virtual Reality Mechanism Design Studio (VRMDS), an intuitive virtual environment for supporting the interactive design and simulation of mechanisms. The studio allows users to build spatial or planar mechanisms through intuitive operations and subsequently simulate their dynamic motion. Written in Python script language, VRMDS provides 3D stereoscopic immersive visualization, haptic enabled interaction, head and hand tracking and a user-friendly graphical user interface. A data model for organizing the data structure of links and commonly used mechanical joints is designed and implemented upon the basis of the Vizard Virtual Reality (VR) library. Within the virtual environment, the user can create links and assemble them into a mechanism by defining joints between links. Simultaneously, a corresponding MATLAB’s SimMechanics model is automatically created at run time. The dynamics simulation of mechanisms is enabled by interfacing with the dynamics solver built-in SimMechanics. The user may choose to run the system in an immersive VR environment or a desktop environment. The result is a versatile mechanism design tool that is beneficial to the early stages of the design process. A case study of a spatial mechanism is provided to demonstrate the usefulness of this system in mechanism design.