Spherical deployable linkage assembly
This assembly of spherical rhombus linkages expands to enclose a volume. It was designed by Jerome Choe to explore the construction of complex articulated systems. (UCI Robotics and Automation Lab)
C. J. Sangwin’s linkage movies
Chris Sangwin has a nice collection of linkage movies at How round is your circle?.
Particularly nice are the straight line mechanisms such as Hart’s second straight-line mechanism.
His example of the Sarrus linkage is also found on YouTube:
Brock Engineering’s mechanism home page
Fred Klingener has generated a number of interesting mechanism animations. My favorite is the Peaucellier straight line mechanism. You will find a table of 16 or so animations at his site:
http://www.brockeng.com/mechanism/index.htm
Brock Institute Logo
Linkage animations on synthetica
This link connects to a web-page with a number of linkage animations. There are several planar four-bar linkages, several spherical four-bar linkages, and an example of a spatial four-bar linkage called a Bennett linkage that is shown below. This page also includes a number of spherical linkage animations generated by students some years ago. (UCI Robotics and Automation Lab)
http://synthetica.eng.uci.edu/Linkages.html
This animation was generated by HaiJun Su using POV-Ray. It is a Bennett linkage designed to guide the coupler linkage through three specified task positions: