A hierarchical methodology for the creative design of mechanisms

A new methodology for the creative design of mechanisms has been developed. A hierarchy is established which is used both to represent the kinematic structure of each mechanism and for the classification of different mechanisms. The consistency between the representation and the classification provides a new perspective to many problems during the creative design of mechanisms and has proven a powerful tool in manipulating a whole class of mechanisms at once. Using this new concept, the following goals are achieved: (1) The kinematic structure of a mechanism can be "spelled-out" by a series of characters, called the stratified code. This code can be used for automatic identification as well as a key for a dictionary-like arrangement of collections of mechanisms. (2) A systematic and fully-automated procedure for exhaustive enumeration of mechanisms was developed. The efficiency of this new procedure is orders-of-magnitude higher than that of traditional procedures. (3) A fully-automated procedure for mechanisms sketching from the stratified code was developed. Sketches generated this way are free of crossing links, properly-dimensioned, and have acceptable transmission angles.; Using this hierarchical approach, millions of mechanisms have been generated. A dictionary of mechanisms sorted by their stratified codes is included in the Appendix. The hierarchical approach has provided elegant solutions to mechanisms identification, enumeration and sketching. Other mechanism design problems should benefit as well if this new approach is adopted.