LEDAS Supports Research on Future CAD at Purdue University

By DE Editors

LEDAS Ltd., a provider of computational components and software development services for the CAD/PLM market, has announced that ongoing research at Purdue University in the field of CAD user interfaces, partially supported by LEDAS, has resulted in creation of a prototype CAD system that allows users to draw as naturally as possible—just as one would draw on paper.

In 2007 LEDAS granted a free academic license for its geometric constraint solver LGS 2D to Purdue University. Since then, a research group under supervision of Professor Karthik Ramani has successfully integrated LGS 2D with their prototype. It has been presented at two scientific events. The first presentation was done at the Sixth Eurographics Workshop on Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling in New Orleans, co-located with SIGGRAPH 2009. Another paper will appear in the proceedings of the ASME 2009 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC/CIE 2009 in San Diego.

“Beautification of freehand sketches is integral for building robust sketch understanding systems and sketch-based interfaces for CAD,” said Sundar Murugappan, a Ph.D. student and co-author in both the publications.

Professor Ramani added that “Many of the current methods for beautification do not consider some important information implied in the sketches such as spatial relationships (geometric constraints) between primitives. We present our ongoing work, a suggestive interface for constraint-driven beautification of freehand sketches, which provides multiple interpretations of the freehand input, from which the user can choose the intended result.”

The research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science in Engineering (CISE) – Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS). In the framework of its academic licensing program LEDAS grants free licenses for 2D and 3D versions of its geometric constraint solvers LGS to non-commercial Academic and Educational organizations.

For more information, visit LEDAS.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.