An Automated Procedure for Intelligent Mechanism Selection and Dimensional Synthesis

This paper describes the fundamentals for the development of the intelligent selection system for the mechanism configuration and the development of an automated dimensional synthesis procedure. The selection system is a rule-based system. Using an interactive dialogue with a designer; the system converges to an appropriate mechanism configuration satisfying a prescribed synthesis requirements including type of synthesis problems, number of precision positions, and number of independent inputs. The user has an option to inquire the selection system to give reasons for the mechanism configuration selection. The automated synthesis procedure uses the data supplied by the selection system to generate the design equations. A powerful numerical algorithm solves the design equations giving all possible solutions without the need of supplying initial guesses. The complete system provides a valuable tool that performs a comprehensive design procedure with minimal user interaction and background knowledge in mechanism design.