• Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.222-233
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• 2010

Developed in this research is a TP (tangible prototyping) system, which consists of two modules; (1) a virtual reality model to evaluate the functions and appearance of the product, and (2) a haptic device to emulate tactile and kinesthetic properties of mechanical dial knobs. As an example, a washing machine is modeled using a commercial CAD system and transformed in VRML and X3D formats. Some dynamic behaviors and kinematic characteristics are programmed using X3D script and Java. Various haptic behaviors of the dial are generated by modulating torque profile according to the rotation angle. A torque profile measuring system is developed to evaluate the behaviors of the haptic dial physically. Haptic sensibility evaluations are accomplished using the TP by semantic differential method.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.285-286
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• 2009

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.527-533
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• 2010

The feeling that is evoked when products are handled has become increasingly important in the design of products primarily used by humans. In the traditional product design process, prototypes are built several times in order to evaluate the feeling evoked during use. However, these design processes can be optimized by adopting a haptic simulator that can serve as a prototype. The design method based on the use of the haptic simulator is called haptics-aided design (HAD), which is the main subject of this paper. Here, a new HAD method that can be effectively used to design a custom-made chair is proposed. A haptic simulator, which is composed of a haptic chair and an intuitive graphical user interface, was developed. The simulator can adjust the impedance of the backrest and seat pan of a chair in real time. The haptic chair was used instead of real prototypes in order to evaluate the comfort of the initially designed seat pan and backrest on the basis of their stiffness and damping values. It was shown that the HAD method can be effectively used to design a custom-made chair and can be extended to other product design processes.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.34 no.11
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• pp.1581-1586
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• 2010

Haptic-aided design (HAD) involves the use of a haptic simulator in place of physical prototypes in the design and development of products with which human beings interact physically. The development time and cost can be significantly reduced by adopting this HAD scheme. Although both physical and emotional factors are equally important, only the emotional factors were taken into consideration in the previous HAD process. Consequently, the design of the products was sometimes unsatisfactory from the viewpoint of ergonomics, even though users were emotionally satisfied with the products. To overcome this problem, in this study, we propose a new human-oriented design methodology that is enhanced by taking the physical factors into consideration. The HAD scheme was verified by using a haptic chair simulator to design a tilt mechanism of an office chair for which the stiffness of the backrest can be adjusted; then, the design was simulated using MADYMO. The results show that the proposed method can reflect both the physical and emotional factors to modify the design in real-time.