Robot-designer: on the road to reality

Three years have passed since the article “Robot-designer: fantasy and reality” was published in the “Ontology of designing” journal No. 4(6) in 2012. This article aims to summarize the results, achieved in Samara State aerospace university in the field of aircraft preliminary design automation. The emphasis was made on the formalization of knowledge, design scenarios and operations in the chosen engineering domain, semantic and mathematical modelling. A “Preliminary aircraft design” thesaurus serves as a semantic basis for the future software system, acting as an integration backbone for data and knowledge bases, design operations and scenarios. A distinctive progress has been achieved in the field of mathematical modelling - a symbiosis of parameterized geometrical models, statistic and finite-element models for evaluation of aerodynamic loads, structural stress and weight. A specific user interface is being created in order to provide a designer with a comprehensive tool that would give the user the necessary information on the project and, if necessary, to “explain” the decisions, that the system makes, or suggests on its own based on the chosen design scenario. Prototype of the “Robot-designer” system, created as a demo unit in a complex high-tech area, holds out a hope of possibility of full automation in the field of designing structures of traditional forms, reducing time, necessary to design artifacts of traditional schemes.