ABSTRACT
This chapter begins the discussion with an algorithm for kinematic analysis. It reviews numerical procedures for solving linear and nonlinear algebraic equations. A MATLAB® program for kinematic and inverse dynamic analyses of the four-bar mechanism is presented that can analyze the response of a four-bar mechanism based on a set of user's supplied data. The chapter discusses a common iterative process known as the Newton–Raphson method. It refers to the results saved in the array Lag to retrieve the reaction forces at the kinematic joints. The input data for idap must be provided as an addition to the kinematics data in the script M-file data.m. Knowing the kinematics of the system at every time step, the equations of motion are solved for the Lagrange multipliers associated with these actual driver constraints. Inverse dynamics is an extension of kinematic analysis in which the reaction forces and the unknown forces or torques associated with the driver constraints are determined.
