CAD client on smart device with drag-type buttons

Abstract

Smart devices have been developed and widely used recently, so they have been applied in the industrial field. If mobile technology is applied to the CAD field, users will be able to obtain many advantages such as high mobility and ease of collaboration. To develop a feature-based CAD system that can be made available on smart devices, we suggested a system using multi-touch inputs in 2012; this was a stand-alone system available without a network. However, the system could not create complex shapes by itself because of the absence of a modeling kernel for the mobile platform and the low computing power of smart devices. To solve this problem of shape creation, this study proposes a client-server system for CAD systems on smart devices. When modeling commands are created from drag-type buttons, at each step, the analyzed modeling commands are sent to the server, the server creates the model and sends it to the smart device, and the smart device visualizes the modeling result. This system can make more complex models than those possible with the existing system. This study compares the developed system with the existing system in order to verify the usability of the new CAD system on smart devices; further, this study suggests how to extend this system to collaborative systems. This CAD system for smart devices can increase the mobility and cooperative nature of CAD systems.