A method for configuration representation of metamorphic mechanisms with information of component variation

Abstract

The metamorphic mechanism has the characteristics of multi-configuration, variable constraints, and multi-function. For achieving the variation characteristics of the topological structures in different configurations and the coupling relations intuitively during the process of configuration transformation, a novel comprehensive symbolic matrix for representing the topological structures of the metamorphic mechanism is proposed. The information including variation of components, the relative joint orientations is involved in this new adjacency matrix. The variation characteristics and coupling features of the metamorphic mechanism can be obtained by the generalized operations including intersection and difference on the corresponding symbolic matrices. © Springer-Verlag 2012.