An Automatic Method for Sketching of Planar Simple and Multiple Joint Kinematic Chains

Abstract

The sketching of mechanisms (kinematic chains) shows designers a visual understanding of the interrelationship among links and joints in mechanical design, but sketching of mechanisms in manually in conceptual design stage is time-consuming and inefficient. In this paper, a fully-automatic method for sketching of planar simple and multiple joint kinematic chains is proposed. First, the complete sets of the topological structures (topological graphs and contracted graphs) of both simple and multiple joint kinematic chains are introduced. Then an algorithm for the layouts of the contracted graphs with minimal edge crossings is proposed. Third, the expression set of binary sub-paths derived from a topological graph is obtained for the sketching of the simple joint kinematic chain, and based on the sketching of the simple joint kinematic chains the sketching of corresponding multiple joint kinematic chains is obtained. Finally, both simple and multiple joint kinematic chains with numbers of links and numbers of basic loops are provided in batch as examples to show the effectiveness of the method.