ABSTRACT
The goal of this book has been to study the available options that may be used to automate the design of mechanisms in a simulation based design process. Our approach has been to start with the positioning and orienting the joints in space, and at the same time identify the links the different joints are connecting. Based on these joint definitions the link connectivity is derived. If two joints are connected to a link it is called a binary link; if three joints are connected to the link it is call ternary; if four joints are connected to a link it is called quaternary and so on. Link geometry connections between joints in a link is constructed from a set of cross section definitions. For a binary link there is only one connection that always needs to be there. For a ternary link there are potentially three connections and all three do not necessarily need to be there; two could be enough. For a quaternary link there are 6 possible connections and you usually like to suppress some of them. We call these connections members and for higher-order links many of these connections/members need to be suppressed. More details about this can be studied in Section 4.3.
