Reconfiguration principles and strategies for reconfigurable mechanisms

It has been perceived that the reconfigurable mechanism has gradually evolved attractive paradigms for studying the mechanism and machine science towards an overwhelming new direction. More and more studies have been put forward during the past decade, leading to numerous fruitful efforts to this new research field. While the studies about the reconfigurable mechanisms were obviously increased, manifold, and diverse, there should be a good discussion about reconfigurable mechanisms to steer the relevant works towards the rational directions. This paper is, therefore, organized in a logical way to provide a test stone for the relative studies, especially for those in the filed of mechanism and machine science, on reconfigurable mechanisms. The paper provides identification of topology and configuration of mechanisms and gives the theoretical principles and practical strategies for changing the topology and/or configuration of mechanisms. It is expected that based on this result more studies for the reconfigurable mechanisms can be motivated in the future.