QUALITATIVE KINEMATICS IN MECHANISMS

This thesis investigates the problem of reasoning about the kinematic interactions between parts of a 2-dimensional mechanism as a first step towards a general theory of qualitative kinematics, and introduces the concept of place vocabularies as a generative symbolic description of the possible motion of the part of a mechanism.

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of reasoning about the kinematic interactions between parts of a mechanism. We introduce the concept of Place Vocabularies as a useful symbolic description of the possible interactions. We examine the requirements for the representation and introduce a definition of place vocabularies that satisfies them. We show how this representation can be computed from metric data and used as a basis for qualitative envisionments of mechanism behavior, and describe implemented algorithms to solve this problem.