Virtual reality environment for the conceptual design of mechanisms

The goal of this thesis is to provide a mechanism design tool to address some of the issues encountered in early design stages by current available technologies in industry and academia. As a solution, we present Virtual Reality Mechanism Design Studio (VRMDS). VRMDS is an intuitive virtual environment (VE) 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 (GUI). 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 mechanisms 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.