Structural synthesis of plane kinematic chain inversions without detecting isomorphism

Abstract

A plane kinematic chain inversion refers to a plane kinematic chain with one link fixed (assigned as the ground link). In the creative design of mechanisms, it is important to select proper ground links. The structural synthesis of plane kinematic chain inversions is helpful for improving the efficiency of mechanism design. However, the existing structural synthesis methods involve isomorphism detection, which is cumbersome. This paper proposes a simple and efficient structural synthesis method for plane kinematic chain inversions without detecting isomorphism. The fifth power of the adjacency matrix is applied to recognize similar vertices, and non-isomorphic kinematic chain inversions are directly derived according to non-similar vertices. This method is used to automatically synthesize 6-link 1-degree-of-freedom (DOF), 8-link 1-DOF, 8-link 3-DOF, 9-link 2-DOF, 9-link 4-DOF, 10-link 1-DOF, 10-link 3-DOF and 10-link 5-DOF plane kinematic chain inversions. All the synthesis results are consistent with those reported in literature. Our method is also suitable for other kinds of kinematic chains.