On Man-Machine Collaboration for Computer Aided Conceptual Design of Mechatronic Products

Conceptual design phase is the most important creative phase of the whole design process. In order to computerize the conceptual design of mechatronic products, man-machine collaboration was adopted. Computers completed all those programmable tasks, and designers processed others unable to be programmed. How to allocate tasks depended on the innovative pattern within those subprocesses of conceptual design. In this paper, an integrated conceptual design model containing concurrent evolution of both function-behavior-structure and function relation-behavior relation-structure relation is set up. And the six-level hierarchy of creativity in conceptual design is revealed, namely task innovation, function innovation, mechanism innovation, behavior innovation, structure innovation and motion parameters innovation. Also man-machine collaboration-oriented conceptual design is analyzed and its seven key technologies are proposed and discussed in detail. This work is helpful to the practical study of computer aided conceptual design of mechatronic products.