Generating Multiple New Designs from a Sketch

Abstract

We describe a program called SketchIT that transforms a single sketch of a mechanical device into multiple families of new designs. It represents each of these families with a "BEP-Model," a parametric model augmented with constraints that ensure the device produces the desired behavior. The program is based on qualitative configuration space (qc-space), a novel representation that captures mechanical behavior while abstracting away its implementation. The program employs a paradigm of abstraction and resynthesis: it abstracts the initial sketch into qc-space then maps from qc-space to new implementations. Introduction SketchIT is a computer program capable of taking a single sketch of a mechanical design and generalizing it to produce multiple new designs. The program takes as input a stylized sketch of the original design and a description of the desired behavior and from this generates multiple families of new designs. It does this by first transforming the sketch into a represent...