Computer-aided structural synthesis of planar kinematic chains with simple joints

This paper presents a straightforward approach for the computer-aided structural synthesis of planar kinematic chains with simple joints, which consists of systematic generation of possible contracted link adjacency matrices, detection of degenerate chains and identification of isomorphic chains. Based on the proposed algorithm, a computer program is developed such that the catalogues of planar kinematic chains with the given number of links and degrees of freedom can be synthesized automatically. The number of kinematic chains with up to 13 links are listed.