Hierarchical clustering approach for determination of isomorphism among planar kinematic chains and their derived mechanisms

Abstract

The problem of isomorphism among kinematic chains and their derived mechanism has been a hot area of research from last several years. The researchers so far have proposed many methods which are mainly based on characteristic polynomial and some code based methods to test the isomorphism among kinematic chains. In this present communication a hierarchical clustering based computerized method is proposed for the above said problem and it is tested for planar kinematic chains upto twelve links without any counter examples. In this method a hierarchical clustering algorithm is also developed for the identification of distinct mechanism derived from kinematic chains. In this method kinematic chains are represented in the form of weighted squared shortest path distance matrix and this matrix is further transformed in the form of tree or dendrogram with the help of hierarchical clustering algorithm. This algorithm directly gives the number of distinct mechanism derived from a given kinematic chain. The cophenetic correlation coefficient of dendrogram is used as an index for isomorphism identification among kinematic chains. The proposed method is efficient and accurate and only one matrix for a given kinematic chain is developed for the determination of distinct mechanisms. This method is successfully examined for one degree of freedom, 6, 8, 10, 12 links planar kinematic chains, 9 links two degree of freedom and 10 links three degree of freedom planar kinematic chains. The computer algorithm for the proposed method has been proposed which can easily be converted into a computer program. These results are useful for designers to detect isomorphism in mechanisms derived from kinematic chains and duplication among kinematic chains.