Visualizing three-dimensional Configuration Spaces for Mechanical design

We describe a configuration space visualization program for mechanical design. Configuration space is a geometric representation of mechanical function that encodes Quantitative information, such as part motions, and qualitative information, such as system failure modes. The program helps designers elucidate the qualitative information, which appears as geometric properties of the configuration space. The research challenge is to relate the configuration space geometry to the mechanical function of the parts. This is difficult because configuration space is a foreign language to designers and because its geometry is complex and nonlinear. We demonstrate the efficacy of our program on two small, but realistic design examples.