MechDev-AI
Synthesis using artificial intelligence
Motivation
Mechanism synthesis, together with structure and dimension synthesis, is the central step in mechanism development. In this step, both the mechanism structure and the dimensions to fulfill a motion task are determined and thus the properties of a mechanical motion device are significantly determined.
Due to its mechanism importance, experience but also expertise is mandatory for the satisfactory synthesis of the mechanisms. Due to the decreasing number of mechanism engineering institutes in Germany, the number of engineers with the specialized knowledge required for mechanism design is also decreasing. In order to nevertheless ensure the fulfillment of the increasing requirements by mechanical motion devices in the future, this project investigated how the expert knowledge can be integrated into a mechanism software by means of artificial intelligence.
Goal
In this project an Artificial Intelligence is used to integrate the mechanism technical knowledge in the best possible way into the Software Mechanism Developer. Thereby, by specifying a synthesis task, several mechanism should be able to be determined fully autonomously to fulfill the given task.
Result
To fulfill this task, an expert system for the synthesis of guide and transmission mechanism was developed. This expert system accesses a database of different mechanism structures, and uses a modular synthesis strategy to determine the optimal mechanism dimensions.
A more detailed description of the procedure and further results can be found in the dissertation "Artificial Intelligence for Structure and Dimension Synthesis of Planar Guidance and Transmission Gears" of Mario Müller.
The present artificial intelligence currently only evaluates the fulfillment of the motion task in the synthesis. In the future, it is planned to consider additional criteria such as the transmission behavior.