Design and development of planar reconfigurable motion generators

This article presents the concept of a new class of mechanical devices for multi-phase motion generation tasks. Recon gurable Motion Generators are a new class of mechanical devices that are designed for a speci c part family and their associated motion generation tasks. The research endeavors to realize a novel concept for Recon gurable Motion Generators (RMGs) for multiphase planar motion generation. Recon gurable Motion Generators are capable of con guration changes according to variations in the motion generation requirements. Thus, Recon gurable Motion Generators bridge the gap between the relative high exibility and high cost of totally exible devices (e.g., industrial robots) and the low exibility and low cost of fully dedicated devices (e.g., cams and linkages). This paper introduces the concept of Recongurable Motion Generators that may be deployed in various automated manufacturing environments involving multi-phase motion generation tasks. The development, manufacturing, and testing of a prototype and the control system for a planar Recon gurable Motion Generator based on a ve-bar mechanism are discussed. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 13 January 2015 Accepted 17 September 2015