McCarthy Design Associates has developed a variety of linkage design tools that it makes available to engineers around the world. In particular, the MechGen FG and MechGen SP applications are marketed through the Apple App Store. None of our software applications collects information about the individuals who purchase or use this software. In particular, MechGen […]
Now Available on Amazon In this book, we present the detailed design of mechanical walking robots that are driven by a single motor. These walkers rely on specially designed leg mechanisms coordinated by gear trains in order to walk, rather than multiple computer controlled motors per leg. The result is a simplified walking robot that […]
I am pleased to provide the presentations from the 2012 National Science Foundation Workshop on 21st Century Kinematics. These presentations provide insight to the challenges and opportunities for research in mechanical systems and robotics. The NSF Workshop on 21st Century Kinematics at the 2012 ASME IDETC Conference in Chicago, IL on August 11-12, 2012 consisted […]
Brandon Tsuge describes how to assemble the controller for two motors to drive the right and left sides of a walking machine using an RC transmitter and controller. See The Bored Robot: Using a DC Brushed Motor with a Rotary Encoder.
Kevin Chen, J. Michael McCarthy, Shaun Bentley The design and assembly of our four-legged mechanical walkers can yield single degree-of-freedom systems with so many redundant mates that it stalls SolidWorks’ Motion Analysis. For example, the walker shown in Figure 1 had 782 redundant mates. The procedure outlined below reduced the number of redundant mates […]
While isolated to slow infections of the Coronavirus, over 60 UCI students learned how to apply the principles of Curvature Theory and Finite-Position Synthesis to the design leg mechanisms for mechanical walkers. Their first team project was a four-legged walker that used the coupler curve of a four-bar linkage positioned using a skew-pantograph as the […]
Here are videos of the designs for the four legged mechanical walkers obtained by Teams 2, 4 an 5. This is the final project in my Fall 2019 Kinematic Synthesis course. Team 2 Team 4 Team 5
Here are videos of the designs for the four legged mechanical walkers obtained by Teams 1, 3 an 6. This is the final project in my Fall 2019 Kinematic Synthesis course. Team 1 Team 3 Team 6
Here are the solid models of some of the walkers designed by UC Irvine students in my Spring 2019 course MAE 183 Kinematic Synthesis of Mechanisms. Walker Group 1 Walker Group 2 Walker Group 4 Walker Group 6 Walker Group 8 Walker Group 9 Walker Group 10
This is a series of four videos that show how to: Specify three positions for the foot of a leg consisting of a hip and knee joint; Use three position synthesis to design a four-bar function generator to guide the hip joint; Then use three position synthesis to design a second four-bar function generator to […]