My graduate research was in the area of Automated Design, where I worked on Knowledge Representation (using graph grammars) of Planar Mechanisms and implemented an Optimization-based method to generate multiple linkages based on user requirements.  This was primarily a position-based analysis and involved development of a Kinematic Analysis tool named Planar Mechanism Kinematic Simulator (PMKS). 

The tool is located at http://bit.ly/WPI-MQP-PMKS. This tool works on Internet Explorer and requires the Silverlight Plugin. A new version of this tool called PMKS+ is in development at https://pmksplus.mech.website.

I was advised by Prof. Matthew I. Campbell (currently at Oregon State University) and Prof. Ashish Deshpande (at the University of Texas at Austin for 1 year).

Shown above is a snapshot of the overall implementation. A user sketches the profile that is required to be traced by a linkage.  The optimization-based tool generated different linkage options in a reasonable amount of time. In addition to showing the potential of an automated design process, the goal was also to showcase the usefulness in generating multiple designs for the same problem. This would be ideal in a variety of different situations and unlike a manual process whereby generating such multiple solutions will take a long time. Shown below is a snapshot of the results generated by the tool for benchmark problems.

The PMKS tool’s UI development was spearheaded by Prof. Matthew I. Campbell using Microsoft Silverlight in Visual C#.

[For more info about this work, feel free to Contact me]