Select this link, Four-bar linkages, for a Geogebra book that illustrates linkages ranging from a lever to a crank-rocker that open a door. This includes the construction of a four-bar linkage that coordinates the open and closed positions with specific input crank angles, called a four-bar function generator. The iPad application, MechGen FG, computes four-bar […]
Mark Plecnik has applied his research on the design of six-bar linkage function generators to the challenge of a long travel independent suspension for an off-road vehicle. UCI race car engineering students built a 1/5 scale model of his latest design and compared its performance to his calculated design. For more detail see his video:
The aluminum body developed at Art Institute for our monocoque racecar Phantom on display in the Engineering Gateway building at UCI. Here is another look.
Profs. Carl Nelson and Anurag Purwar organized a Summer School on Kinematic Theory at the University at Buffalo, New York as part of the 2014 ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences. Please select this link to get access to all of the talks: Kinematics Summer School. Select this link for a YouTube playlist of the videos of each […]
Please select this link to open the Geogebra Book containing constructions of a number of interesting linkages. This is an introduction to the useful movement available with articulated systems.
Researchers at Disney Research Zurich provide yet an other design system with the goal of moving digital character design into physical form. This work by Vittorio Megaro (ETH Zurich) and Bernhard Thomaszewski (Disney Research Zürich) and their colleagues can be viewed as two-position synthesis of four-bar “joints” that connect bodies in a serial chain, which […]
Please see our Singular Designs web-site. We look forward to providing our MechGen synthesis software to simplify your linkage design process in SolidWorks. Also see Mechanism Generator.
The NSF Workshop on 21st Century Kinematics at the 2012 ASME IDETC Conference in Chicago, IL on August 11-12, 2012 consisted of a series of presentations and a book of supporting material prepared by the workshop contributors. The book is now available at amazon.com: 21st Century Kinematics–The 2012 NSF Workshop. And here are the seven […]
The server in our UCI Robotics and Automation Laboratory has been revived (thank you Kaustubh). This means the links to course notes and to Mathematica notebooks have been reestablished. Synthetica.eng.uci.edu now links to my web-page which needs work. A laboratory page that will replace this soon.
This is a design concept for a rectilinear eight-bar suspension. It does not manage body roll but it does provide compact large travel.