Quantitative and Qualitative Functional Space Exploitation and its Application in Robot Underactuated Wrist

Conceptual design is an early stage in the product design process, which has an essential effect on the product innovation. This paper is devoted to presenting a systematic approach based on the reasoning of functional space exploitation to increase opportunities for product innovation in conceptual design. A process of functional space exploitation is treated as a three-step process, first transforming original function to derivative functions, then mapping these derivative functions to effects, and at last exploiting these effects to quantitative or qualitative physical quantity space. The functional design of robot underactuated wrist is given as an example, which demonstrates that the methodology is obviously helpful for product innovation.