Performance of EAs for four-bar linkage synthesis

Design of four-bar mechanisms to match more than five points is relaxed accepting tolerance between the input path and the coupler curve. In this work three different evolutionary algorithms such as (GA), (PSO) and (DE) have been applied for synthesis of a four-bar mechanism minimising the error between desired and obtained coupler curve. A new refinement technique for the generation of initial population is also introduced. A comparative study regarding the strengths and limitations of those algorithms is done and performance of DE is found to be the best.