Automatic Design Theory and Realization of Kinematic Schemes for Mechanism System

Abstract

Based on an analysis of mechanism combination methods of a current mechanism system kinematic scheme, input/output kinematic behavior and their constraint relations were proposed to represent the kinematic behavior knowledge of a mechanism system. Furthermore, a tree structure of a kinematic behavior decomposition process for a mechanism system was provided. Considering multiple outputs for a mechanism system, the matching algorithm and the attributes propagation method of kinematic behavior were used to generate a mechanism combination scheme. Its intermediate design solution and the constraint relations between input and output are generated to fill the common blackboard. Moreover, using information in the blackboard as input motion, the behavior attributes of other process actions are transmitted to attribute items of the blackboard, which finally enables a computer-aided automatic design process of a mechanism system kinematic scheme. To avoid the problem of schemes combination explosion caused by unbounded depth in the search process, bounded depth-first search was used to control the number of expanded hierarchies for a design tree. Finally, an example was given to show its feasibility and solution efficiency.

Keywords

conceptual design, mechanism combination, blackboard, process action, design automation, bounded depth-first search