An Automated Kinematic Analysis Tool for Computationally Synthesizing Planar Mechanisms

This paper presents an implementation of kinematic analysis to evaluate planar mechanisms for use in an automated design process. The existing software available for kinematic analysis require the user to manually input the mechanism for analysis. But in order to computationally synthesize planar mechanisms, it is important to automatically define the boundary conditions and adjust the necessary parameters to evaluate the kinematics of the mechanism in consideration. Currently, there are no kinematic analysis tools available that can be integrated with a design generation tool. One of the reasons is the absence of a method which not only solves the kinematics reliably but is also applicable to generalized n-bar mechanisms. The authors have implemented the instant center method for solving velocities, the vector polygon approach for solving accelerations and the dyadic decomposition method for solving positions. This implementation operates on n-bar mechanisms consisting of four-bar loops and one-degree of freedom on revolute (R), prismatic (P) and revolute-prismatic (R-P) joints. The developed method takes advantage of the concepts in object oriented programming as well as a unique representation based on graph-grammar formalism. This paper describes the methodology used for generalizing kinematic analysis for integration with a concept generator along with examples to validate the implementation.