Synthesis of Deployable/Foldable Single Loop Mechanisms With Revolute Joints

This paper presents a geometric approach for design and synthesis of deployable/foldable single loop mechanisms with pure revolute joints. The basic kinematic chains with symmetric mobility are first synthesized, and an intuitive geometric method is proposed for the mobility analysis of these kinematic chains. The deployable/foldable single loop mechanisms can be regarded as a combination of the basic kinematic chains with nontrivial mobility intersection, under this approach, the 5R to 8R single loop mechanisms with symmetric mobility are synthesized systematically. The method for determining the positions of the joint axes on polyhedral links is also proposed, so that the mechanism can be fully deployed or fully folded without suffering from physical interference. Under this framework, a class of novel deployable/foldable single loop mechanisms is developed. The computer-aided design models for typical examples are built to illustrate their feasibility.