The movement of this car door is guided by a spherical Watt I six-bar linkage. This is a test of our prototype MechGen 5 design system. This will be the first design system for these linkages and is a another example of the work by Kaustubh Sonawale and Alex Arredondo.
Mark Plecnik designed this Stephenson II function generator by specifying eight accuracy points and solving the resulting 22 polynomial equations using the numerical homotopy solver, Bertini. He then used Mathematica to examine the 68,000 roots to find 38 useful linkages. SolidWorks was used to generate the solid model and animate the design.