Characterization Based Design Under Dual State Vectors

This paper presents an automated design that is capable of generating large number of possible design concepts of hybrid combined mechanisms by given only the kinematic functions in requirement specifications. A hybrid mechanism is captured with considering its intrinsic multiple loop kinematic behavior being viewed as several kinematic state transformations. The input and output kinematic characteristic states of a subsystem or a basic mechanism unit are represented by qualitative dual state vectors related by characteristic matrix. Each element of the matrix defines a relative transformation and the operation rules of these transformations are defined. The subsystem characteristic matrix is the product of characteristic matrices of the serialized transformation units or addition of the paralleled. The dual state vectors of all available mechanism units are identified and the combination pattern decomposition rules for subsystem are established. Each set of such basic mechanism units and unit connections is the kinematic-to-structural representation of hybrid mechanism. By successive decomposition of logical hybrid connections, a thorough design process for hybrid mechanism is established. Then, the characteristic matrix of a subsystem can be successively decomposed into various sets of characteristic matrices of basic mechanism units. Due to this modularization of kinematic components and connection patterns, a hybrid system is described in functional hierarchy at two levels as the physical mechanism units and logical combination units which facilitate to map kinematic space to characteristic space till to dual state vector routing operations. This laid a ground work for hybrid mechanism design and examples are given to illustrate the proposed design principles.