Developing Classifications for Synthesizing, Refining, and Animating Planar Mechanisms

In this paper we classify several planar single degree-of-freedom mechanisms for developing features in kinematic synthesis software. The goal of the classification scheme is to identify all mechanisms that behave similarly. Roughly speaking, a mechanism’s behavior is assessing whether the input and output links of the mechanisms are capable of a full rotation. The features we use this for are to help identify t he range of motion of the input link of a mechanism, to guide the design of a mechanism to result in a desired classification, and to alter the mechanism such that the classification remains unchanged.