DETERMINING BURMESTER POINTS FROM THE ANALYSIS OF A PLANAR PLATFORM

This paper presents a technique for determining the Burmester points o f flue finitely separated positions in a plane. A Burmester point is t he location of the fixed pivot of an RR dyad that can reach each of th e five positions. These Burmester points are obtained from a ''compali bility platform'' constructed from selected relative poles associated with the five specified displacements. We show that the relative posit ion pole of two assembly configurations of this platform is a fixed pi vot compatible with the five positions. An example originally presente d by Sander and Erdman is used to verify the calculations.