Type Synthesis of Planar Mechanisms Using Topology as an Optimization Design Variable

摘要

This paper presents a new method for the automated type synthesis of planar mechanisms and multibody systems, by explicitly including topology as a design variable in an optimization framework. A genetic algorithm (GA) is employed as the heart of this optimization approach, in which every binary string genome represents the concatenation of the upper-right triangular portion of the link adjacency matrix (LAM) of a mechanism. Different topologies can be explored by the GA when applying genetic operators to the genomes. The evolutionary process does not rely on the results obtained from enumeration. Two examples of topology-based optimization show the applicability of this method to mechanism type synthesis.