Unified synthesis of a planar four-bar mechanism for function generation using a spring-connected arbitrarily sized block model

A unified mechanism synthesis method for simultaneously determining the type and dimension of a planar four-bar mechanism is proposed for function generation synthesis. A spring-connected arbitrarily sized rectangular block model is proposed, and the unified synthesis process is formulated as an optimization problem using this block model. By solving the optimization problem, the type and dimension of a planar four-bar mechanism can be obtained simultaneously for a function generation synthesis. Several function generation synthesis problems are successfully solved with the proposed method. An index to define the level of difficulty of a function generation synthesis problem is proposed based on the standard deviation of curvature and the length of the curve of the desired function.