Big data approach for synthesizing a spatial linkage mechanism

This paper presents a novel two-step method for synthesizing spatial linkage mechanisms. Compared with planar mechanisms, the main challenge in synthesizing spatial mechanisms is that the generating motion varies depending on its mechanism topologies. Therefore, we propose a big data approach to determine the topology of spatial mechanisms. We adopt a three-dimensional (3D) spring-connected rigid block model to represent the topology of the spatial mechanism and project 3D motion onto three orthogonal planes to determine the mechanism topology with big data. In addition, a gradient-based dimension synthesis procedure was carried out to determine a detailed dimension using already determined mechanism topology by mechanism big data. Also, several successful case studies by the proposed approach are presented to support the effectiveness of the proposed synthesis method.