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Motion Exploration of Articulated Product Concepts in Interactive Sketching Environment

Kalyan Ramana Gattoz, Prasad S. Onkar

TL;DR

The paper presents SIMBA, an integrated sketching interface built in Unity that digitizes the natural act of sketching to explore, simulate, and validate motion for articulated product concepts. It maps sketching actions to kinodynamic constraints and provides three tabs (Sketch, Build, Simulate) to enable rapid motion exploration without breaking the sketching activity. A design-study with design students indicates substantial cognitive-load reduction ($\sim$$77\%$) and positive subjective satisfaction, despite some feature-specific gaps and a small sample size. The authors argue that extending SIMBA to full 3D spatial design environments with VR/AR and haptic feedback could further accelerate early-stage product development.

Abstract

In the early stages of engineering design, it is essential to know how a product behaves, especially how it moves. As designers must keep adjusting the motion until it meets the intended requirements, this process is often repetitive and time-consuming. Although the physics behind these motions is usually based on simple equations, manually working through them can be tedious and inefficient. To ease this burden, some tasks are now handled by computers. One common method involves converting hand-drawn sketches into models using CAD or CAE software. However, this approach can be time- and resource-intensive. Additionally, product sketches are usually best understood only by the designers who created them. Others may struggle to interpret them correctly, relying heavily on intuition and prior experience. Since sketches are static, they fail to show how a product moves, limiting their usefulness. This paper presents a new approach that addresses these issues by digitising the natural act of sketching. It allows designers to create, simulate, and test the motion of mechanical concepts in a more interactive way. An application was developed to evaluate this method, focusing on user satisfaction and mental workload during a design task. The results showed a 77% reduction in cognitive effort compared to traditional methods, with users reporting high satisfaction. Future work will focus on expanding this approach from 2D (planar) to full 3D (spatial) design environments, enabling more complex product concept development.

Motion Exploration of Articulated Product Concepts in Interactive Sketching Environment

TL;DR

The paper presents SIMBA, an integrated sketching interface built in Unity that digitizes the natural act of sketching to explore, simulate, and validate motion for articulated product concepts. It maps sketching actions to kinodynamic constraints and provides three tabs (Sketch, Build, Simulate) to enable rapid motion exploration without breaking the sketching activity. A design-study with design students indicates substantial cognitive-load reduction () and positive subjective satisfaction, despite some feature-specific gaps and a small sample size. The authors argue that extending SIMBA to full 3D spatial design environments with VR/AR and haptic feedback could further accelerate early-stage product development.

Abstract

In the early stages of engineering design, it is essential to know how a product behaves, especially how it moves. As designers must keep adjusting the motion until it meets the intended requirements, this process is often repetitive and time-consuming. Although the physics behind these motions is usually based on simple equations, manually working through them can be tedious and inefficient. To ease this burden, some tasks are now handled by computers. One common method involves converting hand-drawn sketches into models using CAD or CAE software. However, this approach can be time- and resource-intensive. Additionally, product sketches are usually best understood only by the designers who created them. Others may struggle to interpret them correctly, relying heavily on intuition and prior experience. Since sketches are static, they fail to show how a product moves, limiting their usefulness. This paper presents a new approach that addresses these issues by digitising the natural act of sketching. It allows designers to create, simulate, and test the motion of mechanical concepts in a more interactive way. An application was developed to evaluate this method, focusing on user satisfaction and mental workload during a design task. The results showed a 77% reduction in cognitive effort compared to traditional methods, with users reporting high satisfaction. Future work will focus on expanding this approach from 2D (planar) to full 3D (spatial) design environments, enabling more complex product concept development.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 21 sections, 10 figures, 6 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Literature Review
  3. Sketching and Modeling
  4. Mechanism Synthesis and Analysis
  5. Usability of sketch-based mechanism design applications
  6. Summary of Literature Review
  7. Methodology
  8. Tool development
  9. Characterisation of design actions for motion exploration for SIMBA
  10. SIMBA features
  11. Usability testing
  12. Experiment design
  13. Subjective satisfaction of SIMBA
  14. Data collection
  15. Data analysis and Results
  16. ...and 6 more sections

Figures (10)

  • Figure 1: Commonly observed articulated products
  • Figure 2: Observations of traditional sketching activity during motion exploration (Source: authors) (a) Subject 1 Sketch (b) Subject 2 Sketch.
  • Figure 3: Methodology followed by the designers while motion exploration in ramana2020designers
  • Figure 4: Methodology (Source: authors)
  • Figure 5: SIMBA features (colour of the widget indicates the active state of operation) (Source: authors)
  • ...and 5 more figures