An intuitive approach to the kinematic synthesis of mechanisms

This paper presents a simplified approach that we have adopted at the University of Bergamo for teaching to Mechanical Engineering BSc students a rather complex subject, as the kinematic synthesis of planar mechanisms. Since a lot of years mechanisms are taught in the "general" course of “Mechanical Systems Engineering”, during fifth semester, focusing mainly on kinematic analysis methods, spanning from graphical methods to complex number representation and to simulation using multibody commercial codes. Detailed methods for mechanisms synthesis and optimization are given only to MSc students of the Mechatronics and Design curricula. To give BSc students the feeling of linkages synthesis, a geometric constraint programming approach is used, based on the sketching mode of a commercial parametric computer-aided-design software, which is used in our course of “Technical Drawings for Industry” (first semester).