A general procedure for the synthesis of mechanisms is presented here. This
approach minimises the error between the actual path of one or several poi
nts of the mechanism and the paths for each of them predefined by a certain
number of points. It is also possible to consider kinematic constraints on
velocity, acceleration and jerk. The optimisation method uses a sequence o
f quadratic problems with an analytical definition of the objective functio
n, constraints and their gradients, while the hessians are computed by fini
te differences. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.