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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Product Design, Reverse Engineering, Rapid Prototyping - a Case Study in Cutlery Production
    (The Eurographics Association, 2007) Magrassi, Grazia; Bordegoni, Monica; Raffaele De Amicis and Giuseppe Conti
    Reverse Engineering and Rapid Prototyping are consolidated practices in the industrial product design process. In any case, best practices should be set up according to the type of product and of objectives. This paper presents the results of a product re-engineering application in the field of high quality stainless steel cutlery. This activity included a re-modeling of a basis-shape that reproduces at best the original shape of a cutlery set designed in the Thirties for Alessi, which is still considered to be very fashionable. The shape of the manufactured physical pieces of cutlery has changed in time in respect to the original design, mainly because of some problems related to their manufacturing, which has been transferred from the central plant to other branches. We have obtained the digital model of the pieces of cutlery on the basis of the analysis of the available original 2D drawings, and of the laser scanning and subsequent re-engineering design of the available manufactured objects. Particularly complex activity was the removal of the shapes deviations due to the different forming techniques used in the various production factories. At the end of the reconstruction activity, physical prototypes of the new models were produced by means of a sintering process in order to evaluate and compare them to the original ones.
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    Direct Visuo-Haptic Display System Using a Novel Concept
    (The Eurographics Association, 2007) Bordegoni, Monica; Covarrubias, Mario; Bernd Froehlich and Roland Blach and Robert van Liere
    In this short paper we describe a Direct Visuo-Haptic Display System (DVHDS) setup based on a DLP projector, an overhead projection plane and a half silvered mirror. The system is specifically designed for being integrated with a haptic system. It offers a large viewing area with a proper haptic work space ideal for full arm movements in an immersive environment. The system allows superimposing the virtual scene onto the user's perspective of the real world. The system supports controlling the sense of depth and the correction of the distortion of the projected image.
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    A Mixed Environment for Ergonomics Tests: Tuning of Stereo Viewing Parameters
    (The Eurographics Association, 2007) Bordegoni, Monica; Caruso, Giandomenico; Ferrise, Francesco; Giraudo, Umberto; Raffaele De Amicis and Giuseppe Conti
    Virtual Reality and related technologies are becoming a common practice in the design industry in general and more specifically in the automotive field. By the joined use of virtual prototyping methodologies it is possible to achieve the reduction of the time-to-market, as well as the costs deriving from the creation of physical prototypes. Ergonomics tests conducted in Virtual Reality environments can be successfully used to influence the design of products. We have set up a mixed reality environment that allows us to simulate and test postural aspects as well as various levels and modalities of users' interaction. In order to achieve a performing interaction, correct registration and visualization parameters must be carefully set for preventing possible interaction errors, such as pointing with precision to the assigned target. The paper presents a methodology for tuning stereoscopic properties of the mixed reality environments used for ergonomic tests of a car interior in order to achieve correct visualization and positioning parameters. The environment includes a virtual human controlled by an optical motion tracking system, physical objects onto which the graphic virtual environment is superimposed, and a rotatory haptic device for controlling the car on-board infotainment. interface.
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    Geodesic Haptic Device for Surface Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association, 2009) Cugini, U.; Bordegoni, Monica; Covarrubias, M.; Antolini, M.; Michitaka Hirose and Dieter Schmalstieg and Chadwick A. Wingrave and Kunihiro Nishimura
    This paper describes a haptic device whose aim is to render the contact with a continuous and developable surface by means of the representation of a geodesic trajectory. Some preliminary tests conducted with industrial designers have showed that the trajectories performed while exploring the surface of a style product, for a qualitative evaluation, follows some particular trajectories that may be mathematically described as geodesic curves. In order to represent these particular curves a haptic strip based on a modular servo-controlled mechanism has been developed. Each module of mechanism allows us to control both the curvature and the torsion. This device, in respect to the commercial existing haptic devices, allows a hand-surface contact with the virtual model in real scale without artifacts, by self-deforming its shape in order to conform to the mathematical curve to render. The strip is 900 mm long and has 9 control points for bending and 8 control points for torsion. Due to these characteristics, it allows us to render exploration trajectories of several kinds of product shapes and dimensions. In order to allow users to fully explore an object surface, we have mounted the strip on a platform consisting of two MOOG-FCS HapticMaster devices, which permits 6DOF orientation of the strip and force feedback control. The paper describes the mechanism of the strip and the 6DOF platform starting from the empirical observations of the exploration of surfaces and highlights the problems encountered and the solutions adopted.
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    Environment based on Augmented Reality and Interactive Simulation for Product Design Review
    (The Eurographics Association, 2008) Bordegoni, Monica; Ferrise, Francesco; Ambrogio, Marco; Caruso, Giandomenico; Bruno, Fabio; Caruso, Francesco; Vittorio Scarano and Rosario De Chiara and Ugo Erra
    The aesthetic impact of a product is an important parameter that makes the difference among products technologically similar and with same functionalities. Product shape, which is strictly connected to the aesthetic impact, has different meanings if seen from the design and the engineering point of view. The conceptual design of shape of aesthetic products is usually performed by designers at the beginning of the product development cycle. Subsequent engineering design and studies, such as structural and fluid-dynamic analyses, lead to several design reviews where the original shape of the object is often modified. The design review process is time consuming, requires the collaboration and synchronization of activities performed by various experts having different competences and roles, and is performed using different tools and different product representations. Then, computer aided tools supporting conceptual design and analysis activities within the same environment are envisaged. The paper presents the conceptual description of an environment named PUODARSI that allows designers to modify the shape of a product and evaluate in real-time the impact of these changes on the results of the structural and fluid dynamic analyses in an Augmented Reality (AR) collaborative environment. Main problems in integrating tools developed for different purposes, such as, haptic interaction, FEM and CFD analyses, AR visualization concern the feasibility of the integration, the data exchange, and the choice of those algorithms that allow all that while guaranteeing low computational time. The paper describes the main issues related to the choice of hardware and software technologies, and the PUODARSI system implementation.