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Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving transformative changes across numerous fields, revolutionizing conventional processes and creating new opportunities for innovation. The development of mechatronic systems is undergoing a similar transformation. Over the past decade, modeling, simulation, and optimization techniques have become integral to the design process, paving the way for the adoption of AI-based methods. In this paper, we examine the potential for integrating AI into the engineering design process, using the V-model from the VDI guideline 2206, considered the state-of-the-art in product design, as a foundation. We identify and classify AI methods based on their suitability for specific stages within the engineering product design workflow. Furthermore, we present a series of application examples where AI-assisted design has been successfully implemented by the authors. These examples, drawn from research projects within the DFG Priority Program \emph{SPP~2353: Daring More Intelligence - Design Assistants in Mechanics and Dynamics}, showcase a diverse range of applications across mechanics and mechatronics, including areas such as acoustics and robotics., Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures, joint publication of the priority programme SPP 2353

Data-based methods have gained increasing importance in engineering, especially but not only driven by successes with deep artificial neural networks. Success stories are prevalent, e.g., in areas such as data-driven modeling, control and automation, as well as surrogate modeling for accelerated simulation. Beyond engineering, generative and large-language models are increasingly helping with tasks that, previously, were solely associated with creative human processes. Thus, it seems timely to seek artificial-intelligence-support for engineering design tasks to automate, help with, or accelerate purpose-built designs of engineering systems, e.g., in mechanics and dynamics, where design so far requires a lot of specialized knowledge. However, research-wise, compared to established, predominantly first-principles-based methods, the datasets used for training, validation, and test become an almost inherent part of the overall methodology. Thus, data publishing becomes just as important in (data-driven) engineering science as appropriate descriptions of conventional methodology in publications in the past. This article analyzes the value and challenges of data publishing in mechanics and dynamics, in particular regarding engineering design tasks, showing that the latter raise also challenges and considerations not typical in fields where data-driven methods have been booming originally. Possible ways to deal with these challenges are discussed and a set of examples from across different design problems shows how data publishing can be put into practice. The analysis, discussions, and examples are based on the research experience made in a priority program of the German research foundation focusing on research on artificially intelligent design assistants in mechanics and dynamics., Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures

The segmentation of individual trees from forest point clouds is a crucial task for downstream analyses such as carbon sequestration estimation. Recently, deep-learning-based methods have been proposed which show the potential of learning to segment trees. Since these methods are trained in a supervised way, the question arises how general models can be obtained that are applicable across a wide range of settings. So far, training has been mainly conducted with data from one specific laser scanning type and for specific types of forests. In this work, we train one segmentation model under various conditions, using seven diverse datasets found in literature, to gain insights into the generalization capabilities under domain-shift. Our results suggest that a generalization from coniferous dominated sparse point clouds to deciduous dominated high-resolution point clouds is possible. Conversely, qualitative evidence suggests that generalization from high-resolution to low-resolution point clouds is challenging. This emphasizes the need for forest point clouds with diverse data characteristics for model development. To enrich the available data basis, labeled trees from two previous works were propagated to the complete forest point cloud and are made publicly available at https://doi.org/10.25625/QUTUWU.

In mechanical structures like airplanes, cars and houses, noise is generated and transmitted through vibrations. To take measures to reduce this noise, vibrations need to be simulated with expensive numerical computations. Deep learning surrogate models present a promising alternative to classical numerical simulations as they can be evaluated magnitudes faster, while trading-off accuracy. To quantify such trade-offs systematically and foster the development of methods, we present a benchmark on the task of predicting the vibration of harmonically excited plates. The benchmark features a total of 12,000 plate geometries with varying forms of beadings, material, boundary conditions, load position and sizes with associated numerical solutions. To address the benchmark task, we propose a new network architecture, named Frequency-Query Operator, which predicts vibration patterns of plate geometries given a specific excitation frequency. Applying principles from operator learning and implicit models for shape encoding, our approach effectively addresses the prediction of highly variable frequency response functions occurring in dynamic systems. To quantify the prediction quality, we introduce a set of evaluation metrics and evaluate the method on our vibrating-plates benchmark. Our method outperforms DeepONets, Fourier Neural Operators and more traditional neural network architectures and can be used for design optimization. Code, dataset and visualizations: https://github.com/ecker-lab/Learning_Vibrating_Plates, Comment: Accepted at Neurips 2024

Laser-scanned point clouds of forests make it possible to extract valuable information for forest management. To consider single trees, a forest point cloud needs to be segmented into individual tree point clouds. Existing segmentation methods are usually based on hand-crafted algorithms, such as identifying trunks and growing trees from them, and face difficulties in dense forests with overlapping tree crowns. In this study, we propose TreeLearn, a deep learning-based approach for tree instance segmentation of forest point clouds. TreeLearn is trained on already segmented point clouds in a data-driven manner, making it less reliant on predefined features and algorithms. Furthermore, TreeLearn is implemented as a fully automatic pipeline and does not rely on extensive hyperparameter tuning, which makes it easy to use. Additionally, we introduce a new manually segmented benchmark forest dataset containing 156 full trees. The data is generated by mobile laser scanning and contributes to create a larger and more diverse data basis for model development and fine-grained instance segmentation evaluation. We trained TreeLearn on forest point clouds of 6665 trees, labeled using the Lidar360 software. An evaluation on the benchmark dataset shows that TreeLearn performs as well as the algorithm used to generate its training data. Furthermore, the performance can be vastly improved by fine-tuning the model using manually annotated datasets. We evaluate TreeLearn on our benchmark dataset and the Wytham Woods dataset, outperforming the recent SegmentAnyTree, ForAINet and TLS2Trees methods. The TreeLearn code and all datasets that were created in the course of this work are made publicly available.