Automatic synthesis of planar simple joint mechanisms with up to 19 links

This paper presents an automatic method to synthesize mechanisms, namely inversions, from planar non-fractionated simple joint kinematic chains. First, the links of a given kinematic chain are classified into several link groups. The mechanisms whose ground links are in distinct link groups are determined to be non-isomorphic. Then, an improved isomorphism identification algorithm, compared to our previous one, is developed to completely eliminate isomorphic mechanisms whose ground links are in the same link group. As a result, a complete set of planar non-fractionated simple joint mechanisms with up to 19 links is synthesized for the first time. The contrastive analysis between our synthesis results and the ones in literature is conducted to demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the synthesis method.