Brian Wang has sent some photographs of the vehicle he plans to enter into the 2011 UCI Energy Invitational.

Here is one:

Brian Wang 1

Here is another view of the car:

Brian Wang 2

And a photo of the driver’s compartment:

Brian Wang 3

The 2011 UCI Energy Invitational is Tuesday and Wednesday, March 29-30, 2011 at the Streets of Willow Springs. Please see our web-page.

Oscar Alonso replaced the parallelogram drive linkages of the three-panel Volve C70 hardtop convertible with quadrilateral linkages, so it deploys farther and stows more compactly. The wheelbase of this vehicle approaches that of the Mercedes CL500. He used our Mathematica linkage synthesis notebook and our Mechanism Generator add-in for SolidWorks.

This video shows a kinetic sculpture of a horse by the artist Francois Hameury.

His website is http://hameury.sculptures.pagesperso-orange.fr/index.htm

Here is something new. Our Mathematica notebook can find defect-free spherical four-bar linkages that guide a body through five orientations in a tolerance zone near a specified set of task orientations.

Entering UCI engineering students designed, built, and tested RC controlled soccerbots. They competed three on three at the end of the Fall 2010 quarter. This video may be a little over the top, but it does capture the fun.

Geometric Design of Linkages, second edition

I am pleased to say that the second edition of my book, Geometric Design of Linkages, is now available, and I have to express my sincere gratitude to my co-author GimSong Soh, who helped make it happen.

You can find more information at the Springer Verlag web-page, GDL on Springer.com.

It is also already on Google Books, you can see it at the link GDL on books.google.com.

The registration page is now open for the 2011 UCI Energy Invitational. Please register at your earliest convenience, we are planning on 30 entries. If you want to race more than one vehicle, then please register each vehicle separately.

This is a video capture of the operation of our Mathematica notebook for five-position synthesis of a four-bar linkage.   The link to download and try this notebook is on our Linkage Synthesis page.

This is a draft of my editorial on 21st Century Kinematics for the Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics. It is a follow-up to my previous editorial on Kinematics, Polynomials and Computers. I would welcome your feedback.