A General Geometric Method for Identifying Singular Configurations of One-DOF Planar Mechanisms

The importance of finding singular configurations (singularities) of mechanisms has become clear since the interest of the scientific community for parallel architectures arose. Regarding the singularity analysis, the main interest has been devoted to architectures with more-than-one degree of freedom (dof) without realizing that one-dof mechanisms are commonly used and deserve the same attention. This paper addresses the singularity analysis of one-dof planar mechanisms. A general method for implementing this analysis will be presented. The presented method relies on the possibility of giving geometric conditions for any type of singularity. It can be used to generate systems of equations to solve either for finding the singularities of a given mechanism or to synthesize mechanisms that have to match specific requirements about the singularities.