Web services based mechatronics product conceptual design and its application in robot arm and underactuated wrist

Conceptual design is an early stage of the whole mechatronics product development process, which involves the generation of solutions to satisfy the design requirements. It is a crucial issue how to help designers to find proper principle solutions from all knowledge repositories to support conceptual design. This paper proposes a web services based conceptual design methodology in a distributed knowledge resource environment, which can be used to design innovative mechatronics product. The design of service robot arm and underactuated wrist is given as an example, which demonstrates that the methodology is obviously useful.