CREATIVE EXPLORATION OF SCALED PRODUCT FAMILY 3D MODELS USING GESTURE BASED CONCEPTUAL COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN (C-CAD) TOOL

The concepts of scale and platform based product family are being used by many companies to meet the customization needs of customers. Research in the area of product family design predominantly focuses on optimization frameworks. There is a lack of creative conceptual computer-aided 3D modeling tools for product family design exploration. In this papei; a gesture-based conceptual computer-aided design (C-CAD) exploration tool for scaled 3D product family models is presented. The proposed gesture-based C-CAD allows for easy, natural, and intuitive modification of 3D objects to create scaled 3D product family models. The input 3D model for conceptual design exploration purposes are obtained in two ways: (a) 3D model is generated by scanning an existing product using depth sensing (RGBD) camera, and (b) 3D models available in large online repository such as Google Warehouse and TurboSquid are used as-is. Hand gestures recognized using the DepthSense (R) 311 (RGB-D) camera from SoftKinetic (R) are used in conjunction with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based geometric algorithms to enable the interactive scaling of inputted 3D models. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated through multiple example problems. The proposed method of 3D model exploration is most useful for product designs that are scaled variants.