A New Family of Bricard Derived Deployable Mechanisms

Abstract

This paper proposes a new family of single degree of freedom (DOF) deployable mechanisms derived from the threefoldsymmetric deployable Bricard mechanism. The mobility and geometry of original threefoldsymmetric deployable Bricard mechanism is first described, from the mobility characterstic of this mechanism, we show that three alternate revolute joints can be replaced by a class of single DOF deployable mechanisms without changing the single mobility characteristic of the resultant mechanisms, therefore leading to a new family of Bricardderived deployable mechanisms. The computeraided design (CAD) models are used to demonstrate these derived novel mechanisms. All these mechanisms can be used as the basic modules for constructing large volume deployable mechanisms.