GLOVES: A Graphical Layout of Vehicle Systems for the Engineering Sketch Pad

During conceptual aircraft design, the layout (arrangement and size) of an aircraft’s components are continuously updated. Current computational environments, such as NASA’s Open Vehicle Sketch Pad, allow for the designer to indirectly manipulate the layout by using sliders in a separate window. However, there is no way for the designer to directly interact with the components and change their shape or size. Furthermore, the user is not given any immediate feedback on how the design change affected the overall system. The Graphical Layout of Vehicle Systems, GLOVES, allows a designer to interactively arrange and size predefined or custom aircraft components within the Engineering Sketch Pad software. That way, the designer can create an aircraft layout starting with the payload arrangement and finish with a completed outer mold line. The distinguishing features of GLOVES include: (1) the ability to directly manipulate the geometry in real-time; (2) a weight and balance analysis that updates both the components’ and overall centers of gravity as the geometry changes. These features provide the user with immediate feedback on how changing the geometry affects the layout and its mass properties. To demonstrate the current capabilities of GLOVES, a simple transport aircraft layout is created. It is shown that interactively manipulating the components in a graphical user interface is more effective than using sliders.