Improvements to mechanism synthesis methods

Four-bar mechanisms are used quite extensively in industry to obtain unusual motions because they are simple and cheap to build and provide good service as compared to cams which are much more difficult to manufacture. However, cams have the advantage of being much easier to design than the four-bar mechanism. One type of linkage design is that of finding a mechanism which moves a lamina through a number of nominated positions. This type of synthesis is called motion generation or sometimes referred to as the plane path problem. This is the type of synthesis primarily studied in this dissertation. Several other types of synthesis problem such as function generation and point path-angle synthesis can be transformed to motion generation problems. [...]