Kong, X.; Wang, J. Reconfiguration Analysis and Characteristics of a Novel 8-Link Variable-DOF Planar Mechanism with Five Motion Modes. Machines2023, 11, 529.
Kong, X.; Wang, J. Reconfiguration Analysis and Characteristics of a Novel 8-Link Variable-DOF Planar Mechanism with Five Motion Modes. Machines 2023, 11, 529.
Kong, X.; Wang, J. Reconfiguration Analysis and Characteristics of a Novel 8-Link Variable-DOF Planar Mechanism with Five Motion Modes. Machines2023, 11, 529.
Kong, X.; Wang, J. Reconfiguration Analysis and Characteristics of a Novel 8-Link Variable-DOF Planar Mechanism with Five Motion Modes. Machines 2023, 11, 529.
Abstract
Variable-DOF (or kinematotropic) mechanisms are a class of reconfigurable mechanisms. The number of variable-DOF multi-loop planar mechanisms proposed so far is very limited. This paper proposes a novel 8-link variable-DOF planar mechanism with five motion modes. Firstly, a description of the 8-link variable-DOF planar mechanism is presented. Reconfiguration analysis of the 8-link mechanism is then carried out using an elimination and algebraic geometry hybrid approach. The analysis shows that the 8-link mechanism has one 2-DOF motion mode and four 1-DOF motion modes and can switch among three motion modes at four transition configurations and between two motion modes at the remaining four transition configurations. Geometric characteristics of the mechanism in different motion modes are also revealed. Unlike the variable-DOF planar mechanisms found in literature, the proposed 8-link mechanism has two inactive joints in one of its 1-DOF motion modes, and both 4R kinematic sub-chains of the mechanism must appear as parallelograms in a pair or anti-parallelograms in a pair in the same motion mode. As a by-product, a method for factoring trigonometric functions in two angles is proposed.
Keywords
Variable-DOF mechanism; reconfigurable mechanism; reconfiguration analysis; motion mode; factorization of two-angle trigonometric function
Subject
Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
