Some Special Cases of the Burmester Problem for Four and Five Poses

Abstract

The Burmester problem aims at finding the geometric parameters of a planar four-bar linkage for a prescribed set of finitely separated poses. The synthesis related to the Burmester problem deals with both revolute-revolute (RR) and prismatic-revolute (PR) dyads. A PR dyad is a special case of RR dyad, i.e., a dyad with one end-point at infinity. The special nature of PR dyads warrants a special treatment, outside of the general methods of four-bar linkage synthesis, which target mainly RR dyads. In this paper, we study the synthesis of planar four-bar linkages addressing the problem of the determination of PR dyads. The conditions for the presence of PR dyads with the prescribed poses are derived. A synthesis method is developed by resorting to the parallelism condition of the displacement vectors of the circle points of PR dyads. We show that the “circle” point of a PR dyad can be determined as one common intersection of three or four circles, depending on whether four or, correspondingly, five poses are prescribed.