Our research efforts target two main areas in the product realization process, namely: design methodology/ automation and rapid prototyping and virtual reality for design. These two areas are:
Study the design process from early conception to pre-production. Investigate ways to represent a design through form-function and more recently, affordance relationships. Advance the design theory, methods, and tools for those designs with a magnitude of complexity. Develop mathematical approximation techniques that improve the efficiency of traditional structural optimization methods while providing key parameters that carry information about the relations describing a design process. Multidisciplinary optimization - Robust design, decision analysis and support, concept exploration of complex systems, and simulation-based distributed collaborative systems design. Develop methods for the description and for the evaluation of sensitivities and of metrics. Investigate multi-criteria techniques for design.
Study the computer aided design (CAD) issues related to rapid prototyping and develop algorithms to improve the speed, accuracy and speed of use of rapid prototyping systems. Determine the shortcomings of current CAD systems for design and develop techniques to address and resolve these issues. (involves solid modeling, optimization and expert systems). Develop interfaces between virtual reality and rapid prototyping, and explore the use of VR as a truly 3D CAD modeler. See Virtual Reality Research at Clemson. See also the "Clemson Intelligent Design Environment for Stereolithography" (CIDES, for short) and the Product Realization Lab at Clemson.
For a list of possible projects Fall of 2005, please refer to the following web site: Potential Projects