Representation of Topological Changes in Metamorphic Mechanisms With Matrices of the Same Dimension

Abstract

This short paper introduces a new adjacency matrix to represent the topological changes of metamorphic mechanisms. An element “−1” is introduced to indicate the frozen kinematic pairs, which gives an easy way to represent the transformation and the dimension of the adjacency matrix is kept unchanged after the transformation. In this way, the information of the original mechanism is preserved and all possible changes of the mechanism can be derived according to the adjacency matrix. A demonstration example is included.