MechDev—A New Software for Developing Planar Mechanisms

At the Institute of Mechanism Theory, Machine Dynamics and Robotics of RWTH Aachen University, software for the design of planar mechanisms is currently being prepared. This software aims to be easy to handle and at the same time include new functionalities. To allow a dynamical extension of the software, a special software architecture based on Plug-Ins is defined. One of these Plug-Ins is the kinematical analysis. It combines analytical and numerical computation methods. The basic approach of this functionality will be presented within this paper. It allows a powerful and modern handling during the mechanism design process.