ABSTRACT
Our work advances the state of the art in kinematic modeling for tolerancing. Kinematic tolerance space is the first general representation for variational classes of kinematic functions. It represents fixed and changing contacts and quantitative and qualitative variations in kinematic function. It represents the nominal kinemat ics and its variations in a uniform manner, thus elim inating the need for a separate tolerance model. The kinematic tolerance space computation program auto mates a significant part of kinematic tolerance mod eling. It is also useful for related tasks in mechanism analysis and design. For example, we can model part wear with geometric tolerances and compute the kine matic tolerance space to analyze the consequences of the wear. We can fine-tune designs by specifying a range of variations and selecting the best parameter value combination as the nominal specification. Toler ancing for assembly can also be studied with kinematic tolerance spaces. The task is to compute whether every mechanism in the variational class can be assembled, which involves reasoning about the variational class of kinematic function under assembly motions [7, 21, 13].
