A simple method for the synthesis of 2D and 3D mechanisms with kinematic constraints

A general procedure for the synthesis of mechanisms is presented here. This approach minimises the error between the actual path of one or several points of the mechanism and the paths for each of them predefined by a certain number of points. It is also possible to consider kinematic constraints on velocity, acceleration and jerk. The optimisation method uses a sequence of quadratic problems with an analytical definition of the objective function, constraints and their gradients, while the hessians are computed by finite differences.