Melody Vo of the UCLA Super mileage team reports that the change in dates of the Energy Invitational may affect their plans to attend this event. Here is the photo of their proposed entry which competed successfully in Shell Eco-Marathon.
UCLA Supermileage
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
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.
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.
This shows 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.
UCI Energy Invitational
The 2011 UCI Energy Invitational will be at Willow Springs International Motorsports Park on March 22-23, 2011. The Streets of Willow Springs will be set up with a highway, autocross and staged idle sections to challenge the energy usage of all types of vehicles. How far can your vehicle travel in an hour on this course using only $1.00 of energy? Please contact me if you are interested.
Select this link to the .pdf of Kinematics, Polynomials, and Computers–A Brief History, which is a summary of the history of the kinematics of mechanisms and robotics with a focus on the challenge of solving the polynomial equations that arise in their study. It is a draft of my February 2011 editorial for the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics.
***Update*** This version has a correction to references [29] and [30].