No abstract

In the face of an ever-changing global market, companies able to launch new products meeting consumer needs faster than their competitors may not only gain a larger market share, but also shorten the development cycle to reduce costs. However, there are currently no universal design strategies and tools for evaluating the design of consumer products. Therefore, the purpose of this study is mainly to formulate a systematic and innovative product design strategy and evaluation tool, so that designers can use them to select the key factors when designing consumer products and design products that meet customer needs in the shortest development cycle. First of all, this study was designed to sort out general design methods and influencing factors in consumer product design based on theoretical analysis and expert interviews. Next, a questionnaire survey of 15 design-related experts and scholars was conducted, and the most important design methods and design factors were selected using the Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM). After that, the analytical network process (ANP) method was used to obtain the priority weight of each design factor, and select the optimal product design strategy, QTPCP, and the deciding elements that affect consumer demand for products, including 2 dimensions, 11 design elements, and 38 design factors, making theoretical contributions to product design management. The design strategies and evaluation tools developed according to the conclusions are helpful in comprehensive planning and design selection for products of different natures, and make practical contributions, enabling product developers or designers to efficiently select the optimal product design when faced with different new product designs.

Once the input values are given, the active rules in a fuzzy inference execution have been determined. Based on the observation, our approach is to identify the active rules before fuzzy inference execution. To achieve this goal, our architecture provides the following two mechanisms: (1) a mechanism to ignore the non-active rules before fuzzy inference execution; and (2) a mechanism to arrange the active rules for fuzzy inference execution. The proposed architecture has been implemented using a 0.35μm cell library. Implementation data show that, if the number of active rules is only 4, the inference speed can achieve 23.755 MFLIPS. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the fastest hardware implementation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology–based intelligent robots are constructed using different technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), big data, deep learning, machine learning, neural network, and expert system. This particular type of robots can increase the work efficiency of humans and improve their quality of life. From the industry perspective, AI robots possess unlimited potential for development, and they are projected to be a 10-trillion-dollar industry. In this study, the critical technology of IoT is applied to develop a teaching module for an IoT smart home robot. Teaching and evaluation are performed through an embedded thematic-approach teaching strategy in the course named Automatic Measurement and Monitoring. This research aims to teach students how to integrate IoT technology into robot design and construction to build IoT smart home robots. This cross-disciplinary research incorporates emerging technology—integration of smart home, robot construction, and IoT technologies—into industrial education, teaching material and equipment development, and experimental teaching and evaluation. The participating students were juniors or seniors from the Department of Electrical Engineering or Electromechanical Engineering at the University of Technology.