A simple method for the synthesis of 2D and 3D mechanisms with kinematic constraints

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.