Motion generation using combinations of peaucellier straightline mechanisms

The Peaucellier linkage is one of only a handful of known, single-degree-of-freedom mechanisms that trace an exact straight line. Although the traced output is straight, the relation between input rotation angle and output position along the traced line is nonlinear. The purpose of this study is to investigate the composite motion of stacked Peaucellier straight-line mechanisms. After stacking, the original straightline output transforms into a complex curve whose shape is dependent on the motion of all of the component mechanisms, their geometric parameters, and how the component Peaucellier cells are interconnected. MATLAB software was used to generate output curves considering different stacking configurations and mechanism sizes. MATLAB was also used to analyze the final data and identify correlations between the mechanism link sizes, stacking configurations, and relative output curves. Based on a polynomial fitting technique, resultant output of the stacked mechanisms was generally found to be of 6th order except when purposefully constrained. This is a first attempt to characterize kinematic trace curves for this type of stacked straight-line linkage system.