METHOD FOR THE COMPUTER-AIDED STRUCTURAL SYNTHESIS OF PLANAR KINEMATIC CHAINS WITH MULTIPLE JOINTS.

A straight forward method is provided for the generation of planar kinematic chains with multiple joints and having the same numbers of links and degrees of freedom for the given simple kinematic chains. The concept of rigid chains is introduced for checking the existence of degenerate chains during the process of synthesis. The idea of linkage polynomial code is used for testing the isomorphism of derived chains. An interactive computer package is developed such that the catalogue of all nonisomorphic planar kinematic chains with multiple joints and having the same numbers of links and degrees of freedom for the given simple kinematic chains can be synthesized automatically.