Development of Planar Mechanism State Matrices for Reconfigurable Mechanisms Available to Purchase

This paper introduces mechanism state matrices as a novel way to represent the topological characteristics of planar reconfigurable mechanisms. As part of this new concept, these matrices will be used as an analysis tool to automatically determine the degrees of freedom (DOF) of planar mechanisms that only contain one DOF joints. The DOF at each state can be combined with a mechanism state matrix to form an augmented mechanism state matrix. A series of examples will be used to illustrate the proposed concept.