SYNTHESIS OF PLANAR FOUR-BAR MECHANISMS

Designing a four-bar mechanism that guides a coupler system through five given poses is an old and well known problem named after L. Burmester. In this paper we show that with kinematic mapping a much neater, more comprehensive solution is obtained. It produces a univariate quartic that can be solved explicitly. Furthermore, solutions that yield ordinary four-bars, slider­ cranks or elliptical trammels are identified, a-priori.