Abstract
This paper presents complete solutions to the function generation problem of six-link Watt and Stephenson mechanisms, with multiply separated precision positions (PP), using homotopy methods with m-homogenization. It is seen that using the matrix method for synthesis, applying m-homogeneous group theory and by defining auxiliary equations in addition to the synthesis equations, the number of homotopy paths to be tracked in obtaining all possible solutions to the synthesis problem can be drastically reduced. Numerical work dealing with the synthesis of Watt and Stephenson mechanisms for 6 and 9 multiply separated precision points is presented. For both mechanisms, it is seen that complete solutions for 6 and 9 precision points can be obtained by tracking 640 and 286,720 paths, respectively. A parallel implementation of homotopy methods on the Connection Machine on which several thousand homotopy paths can be tracked concurrently is also discussed.