Charles Anderson
IEOR Department
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
cander@ieor.berkeley.edu
Yan Zhuang
Computer Science Department
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
yzhuang@cs.berkeley.edu
Ken Goldberg
IEOR Department
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
goldberg@ieor.berkeley.edu
Digital communication over the Internet offers advantages in terms of speed, efficiency and automation. Fortunately, new geometric algorithms for design, simulation, and manufacturing have been developed and reported in the research literature. Unfortunately, the impact of these advances on the manufacturing community has been limited since implementations are difficult to port from one platform to another.
As an example of how the Web can facilitate interactive design, we focus on one specific application area: modular fixture design. We have substantially extended our previous fixture design service, FixtureNet[Wagner et al., 1996], and added interactive tools to allow the user to build a deeper, more intuitive understanding of the fixtures found by FixtureNet. The first tool allows the user to simulate the effects of forces applied to the part in the fixture. Our second tool enables the user to consider changes to a part and verify in real-time that the fixture will still immobilize the modified part.
Our tools balance the tasks between the Web client and a central server, performing fast user interactions in the client while running compute-bound fixture design jobs on the server.
The implementation of this work can be found online at:
http://riot.ieor.berkeley.edu/riot/Applications
/FixtureNet.
Keywords: modular fixture, design rule, Java applet
Figure 1: Example of a part and a modular fixture.