Machine Kinematics
solved, then drawn
Concept

Path curvature — where it appears

The curvature of the path a point of a moving plane traces, equal to the reciprocal of the radius of the circle the path is momentarily on. It is computed here from the derivatives of the loop equation rather than by differencing a traced path, and the two routes are required to agree.

Named by 19 essays across 7 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

The coupler's motion at 66°. Every point drawn as a stub is a point of the coupler's own plane, and the stub is that point's velocity — solved, not sketched. They all point different ways and they are all consistent with one statement: at this instant the whole plane is turning about a single point, the pole, marked with a cross. It is off this frame at 1.5 coupler lengths from the crank pin, which happens whenever the coupler is close to translating. The arrow through it is the pole's own velocity, which is a quantity about the motion rather than about any point of it, and half of everything in this field follows from its direction and its size. positioned by solving, not by drawing.

The mechanism drops out

Every other field here is about a machine. This one is about the motion a machine makes — a plane sliding over a plane — and near any instant that motion is a handful of numbers with no linkage in them. Two mechanisms that agree on those numbers make the same motion, and one of them can always be thrown away.

curvature · Curvature A point, its pole, and the centre it is turning about. The tracing point is on the coupler at (0.45, 0.5) of its length. The cross is the pole, the faint curve is the path the point traces over a whole turn, and the circle is the one that path is momentarily on — centre marked, radius 0.267. The point, the pole and the centre are collinear, which is not an accident of this position: a point's centre of curvature always lies on its own ray from the pole, and Euler and Savary's relation says where on it. Here that relation puts the centre 5.6e-16 of a unit from where differentiating the loop equation three times puts it. positioned by solving, not by drawing.

Every point has a centre

A point of a moving plane traces a curve, and near an instant that curve is a circle. Which circle is decided by one relation with two numbers in it — the same relation for every point of the plane at once, and it was written down in 1830 with no derivatives visible anywhere in it.

curvature · Curvature The circle of points going straight, at 66°. Every point on this circle is, at this instant, travelling in a straight line: its path has zero curvature there. The circle passes through the pole — where the point is not moving at all — and its diameter is 47.64, which is the pole's own speed divided by the plane's angular rate. Nothing here was assumed to be a circle. The locus is the zero set of a quadratic whose |w|² coefficient is φ′³, a real number with no cross term and no difference between its two square terms, and a general conic fitted to the sampled locus returns those coefficients at 8.1e-15 and 6.4e-15. At this position the coupler is close to translating, the pole has run off the canvas and the circle with it — the figure is the size of the mechanism, and δ here is 13.6 coupler lengths. positioned by solving, not by drawing.

The circle of points going straight

At any instant some points of a moving plane are travelling in a straight line. They form a circle — not nearly a circle, a circle — and the reason is one real coefficient in a quadratic. A coupler curve has an inflection exactly when that circle sweeps over the tracing point, which turns out to be rare.

curvature · Curvature Two poles at 66°, and only one of them is still. The stubs here are accelerations, not velocities, and they vanish at a different point from the one where the velocities vanish. The cross is the velocity pole — the point the plane is turning about — and the square is the acceleration pole, the point that is momentarily not accelerating. Over a full turn of this crank the two are never nearer than 1.49 coupler lengths and get as far apart as 22.2. The instantaneous centre is about velocities and about nothing else: the point that is not moving is being accelerated, usually hard, and a body pivoting about it in the ordinary sense would not be. positioned by solving, not by drawing.

The other pole

The instantaneous centre is the point of a moving plane that is not moving. There is a second point that is not accelerating, it is somewhere else entirely, and over a full turn of one four-bar the two are never closer than one and a half coupler lengths and get as far apart as twenty-two.

curvature · Curvature A cam profile is an envelope, and its curvature obeys the same law. The dashed curve is the pitch curve — where the roller's centre travels — and the solid one is the surface that has to be cut, which is the pitch curve offset inward by the roller radius. That offset is the conjugate law of this field with one centre of curvature sent to infinity, and it says ρ_cut = ρ_pitch − r. Measured off the drawn polyline at six angles, the worst departure is 4.8e-7: at 95° the pitch curve has radius 29.52 and the cut profile 21.52, against 21.52 predicted. It is also why undercutting is a curvature condition rather than an accident: where ρ_pitch falls below the roller radius the offset turns itself inside out.

A profile is an envelope

A cam's surface is not a curve somebody drew. It is the envelope of the roller as the roller runs round the pitch curve, and its curvature is the pitch curve's less the roller radius — a law that this site's cam library was breaking for six months, in the one curve that gets manufactured and the only one no check looked at.

cams · Cam Where the curvature is standing still, at 66°. The cubic of stationary curvature: every point on it traces a path whose curvature has stopped changing at this instant, so its osculating circle fits for one order longer than an ordinary point's. It passes through the pole — twice, with a double point there — and through both moving pins, which is the plainest case there is, since a pin traces an exact circle and a constant curvature is certainly a stationary one. The expression whose zero set this is looks like a quartic and its fourth-degree terms cancel to 1.2e-14 of the third-degree ones. positioned by solving, not by drawing.

Where the curvature stands still

One derivative further on there is a second locus: the points whose path curvature has momentarily stopped changing. The expression whose zero set it is looks like a quartic, its fourth-degree terms cancel, and the cancellation is measured at ten to the minus fourteen rather than assumed.

curvature · Curvature Free to spin, and it cannot turn at all. An ellipse of semi-axes 1.4 and 0.9 inside four flat walls that touch it at the ends of its own axes. Every normal points at the centre, so every row's moment is nought and the four rows span two dimensions rather than three: the cone of permitted twists is the whole spin axis, a line through the origin, and the first-order answer is that the part is free to turn either way. Drag the angle and watch what happens. The ellipse's reach in the direction of the top and bottom walls is √(a²sin²θ + b²cos²θ), which is smallest at θ = 0 and grows from there, so any rotation whatever drives it into both of them — by 0.016 at this angle. A nullity is a candidate and not a motion, and this is the shape of case the fields before this one could not produce: not a mechanism at a singularity, but an ordinary part in an ordinary pocket. positioned by solving, not by drawing.

Free to turn and unable to

An ellipse in a pocket the size of its own bounding box has four contacts whose rows span two dimensions, so the cone of permitted twists is a whole line and the first-order answer is that it spins both ways. It cannot turn by any amount whatever: the penetration grows as the square of the angle, with a fitted exponent of 1.9944, and a circle in the same pocket turns for ever.

holding · Restraint Ball's point at 66°. Two curves and one point. The circle is the locus of points whose path is momentarily straight; the cubic is the locus of points whose path curvature is momentarily not changing. A point on both has a path that is straight and staying straight — four-point contact with its own tangent line, one order better than anything else in the plane. That is Ball's point. Walking the circle and looking for a zero of κ′ turned up 1 sign changes here and 1 of them survived being checked for continuity — the others are the asymptote the pole itself produces. Its measured order of contact with the line is 3.95. positioned by solving, not by drawing.

The straightest point there is

Where the circle of points going straight meets the cubic of points whose curvature is standing still, there is one point whose path is straight and staying straight. Neither Watt nor Chebyshev put their tracing point there, and moving Watt's to it more than halves the error over the whole stroke.

curvature · Curvature Two poles at 66°, and only one of them is still. The stubs here are accelerations, not velocities, and they vanish at a different point from the one where the velocities vanish. The cross is the velocity pole — the point the plane is turning about — and the square is the acceleration pole, the point that is momentarily not accelerating. Over a full turn of this crank the two are never nearer than 1.49 coupler lengths and get as far apart as 22.2. The instantaneous centre is about velocities and about nothing else: the point that is not moving is being accelerated, usually hard, and a body pivoting about it in the ordinary sense would not be. positioned by solving, not by drawing.

Six things a centre is not

The instantaneous centre is the most over-read object in this subject. Six claims about it are in circulation, three are false, two are true of something else, and one is nearly right — and each of them comes with a measurement of how badly it goes wrong.

wrong · Misconception A corner in a curve, and the reason for it. This coupler point traces a curve with a cusp — a corner, where the curve stops and reverses rather than turning. The reason is that a cusp happens where the tracing point is momentarily still, and the only point of a moving plane that is momentarily still is the pole. So the cusps of a coupler curve are the instants when the pole passes through the tracing point: they are the crossings of the tracing point by the moving centrode, which is a statement about two curves in the coupler's own plane with the fixed plane not involved at all. This point was chosen by taking the pole's body coordinate at one instant, so it is on the moving centrode by construction; at the corner its speed is 9.9e-15 against 2.87 a fifth of a radian later. positioned by solving, not by drawing.

Where a curve has a corner

Some coupler curves have corners in them — points where the curve stops, turns round and comes back. A corner happens where the tracing point is momentarily still, the only point of a moving plane that is momentarily still is the pole, and so the corners of a coupler curve are decided entirely inside the coupler's own plane.

curvature · Curvature Two Burmester points, or none, depending where the crank is. A Burmester point's path stays on one circle to fifth order. A planar motion has at most four of them; two of this mechanism's are always its own moving pins, whose paths are exact circles and satisfy every order at once. The other two are real for 67 per cent of the turn and complex for the rest, and the count changes without anything about the mechanism changing. The window matters and is stated: points beyond a hundred coupler lengths from the pole are not counted, and widening the window from six to four hundred moves the count of positions-with-two from 191 to 245 out of 360. A silent cap here would read as an absence.

The circle a point stays on longest

One condition further on are the points whose path holds a circle to fifth order. A planar motion has at most four; two of them are always the mechanism's own pins, and the other two are real for two thirds of a turn and complex for the rest — a count that changes while nothing about the mechanism does.

curvature · Curvature The string is the radius. An involute is generated by unwinding a taut string from the base circle, and the taut string is the flank's normal — so the point where it leaves the base circle is the centre of curvature and the string's length is the radius. At a flank radius r that length is √(r² − r_b²), and the dashed curve is that expression. The dots are the curvature of the polyline this site actually draws, measured by circumcircle through consecutive points, over 324 of them. Worst relative disagreement 1.9e-6. At the base circle the radius of curvature is zero, which is why a flank cut below it is not an involute and why undercutting removes exactly that part.

Two flanks, one law

At a gear mesh the two tooth flanks are conjugate profiles, the pitch point is the pole of their relative motion, and their radii of curvature are tied to each other rather than free. Each flank's radius varies fourfold across the mesh and the sum of the two does not vary at all.

gears · Tooth The circle of points going straight, at 66°. Every point on this circle is, at this instant, travelling in a straight line: its path has zero curvature there. The circle passes through the pole — where the point is not moving at all — and its diameter is 47.64, which is the pole's own speed divided by the plane's angular rate. Nothing here was assumed to be a circle. The locus is the zero set of a quadratic whose |w|² coefficient is φ′³, a real number with no cross term and no difference between its two square terms, and a general conic fitted to the sampled locus returns those coefficients at 8.1e-15 and 6.4e-15. At this position the coupler is close to translating, the pole has run off the canvas and the circle with it — the figure is the size of the mechanism, and δ here is 13.6 coupler lengths. positioned by solving, not by drawing.

A curvature is a size with a minus sign

Everything in the curvature field is a similarity invariant in shape and a reciprocal length in value. Scale a moving plane and its inflection circle scales, its cubic of stationary curvature scales, and every curvature it computes is divided by the factor — so a bigger machine traces gentler paths than its drawing suggests.

curvature · Curvature Three points, three orders of contact. Replace the coupler point by a crank pivoting at the centre of its path's osculating circle, drive the linkage away from the instant, and measure how far the point gets from that circle. The distance grows like a power of the step, and the power is the number of derivatives that agreed. An ordinary point gives 3.00; a point of the cubic of stationary curvature gives 3.94; a Burmester point, where the curvature is stationary and its rate of change is too, gives 4.97. Nothing in the measurement knows which kind of point it was handed. This is what the two special curves are for: they are where a single pivot can replace a whole linkage for longest. positioned by solving, not by drawing.

How long a pivot stands in for a linkage

Throw the four-bar away and replace a coupler point by a crank pivoting at the centre of its path's curvature. The two separate like the cube of the crank step for an ordinary point, the fourth power on the cubic, and the fifth at a Burmester point — three exponents that are the whole field, measured with no derivative anywhere in the measurement.

curvature · Curvature A dwell six-bar built on the vertex of a symmetric coupler curve. The four-bar with ground 3, crank 1, and coupler, rocker and arm all 2.5, with the angle at the rocker pin set to 120.8024°, so that its coupler curve is its own mirror image about the dashed line. The curve crosses that line at crank angle 0°, and a link of the osculating radius there, 5.7691, runs from the tracing point to a pin at the centre of curvature; an output link of 3 from a third ground pivot holds that pin, square to the dwell link at the vertex. Faintly, the dwell link and output 50° of crank either side. The output swings 7.43° over a whole turn, and near the vertex its angle changes only at sixth order in the crank's.

The flattest dwell is not the longest

A coupler curve that is its own mirror image has no odd terms in its distance from a circle centred on the mirror line, so one angle of the coupler can remove the fourth-order term and leave a dwell of sixth order, with no search of the curve. A six-bar built there dwells for 58.7° of crank inside 0.1% of its swing. Turned two degrees away from that angle it dwells for 80.1°, and the searched six-bar for 24.4°.

curves · Coupler Three circles at one point, at 50°. The osculating circle of the fixed centrode at the pole, the osculating circle of the moving centrode there, and the inflection circle. All three pass through the pole and all three have their centres on the common normal — which is what makes the relation between them a relation between three numbers on a line. The two centrode radii are 16.180 and 9.730, signed along that normal, and the inflection circle's diameter is 24.398 against the 24.409 the other two give. Nothing in that arithmetic knows there is a linkage. The window is 30.25 wide and the larger osculating circle is 32.36 across, so it is cut at the edge: what is drawn is the neighbourhood of the pole, where the three curvatures are the same three numbers however far the circles carrying them reach.

The two numbers are the curves' own

Every essay in this field runs on the inflection circle and the pole tangent, and every one has taken them from the motion's derivatives. They are the two centrodes' radii of curvature at the pole, combined harmonically — measurable off the curves with no mechanism in the arithmetic, and carrying a sign that changes eight times in a turn.

curvature · Curvature 24 teeth inside 72. An internal pair, drawn from the same involute the external pairs are drawn from. Three things are different and they are one difference. The centre distance is 24.0 — the difference of the pitch radii rather than their sum. Both base tangency points lie on the same side of the line of action, so the pitch point falls outside the segment between them rather than inside it. And the contact ratio is 1.931 against the external pair's 1.707, because the annulus's tip circle cuts the line on the far side of its own tangency and lengthens the contact path instead of shortening it. The pinion turns the same way as the annulus, which no external pair ever does.

The mesh with one curvature reversed

Turn an annulus's teeth inward and the same involute law produces a different machine: a centre distance that is a difference, two base tangencies on one side of the line of action, more contact than an external pair carries, and three separate floors on the tooth counts, all of them the same statement about where an involute stops existing.

gears · Tooth Holding the coupler still: the frame's inflection circle is the mirror of the coupler's. The four-bar with ground 4, crank 1, coupler 3.5 and rocker 3 at a crank angle of 225°, redrawn in the coupler's own frame, so the coupler is the horizontal bar and the ground link is what moves. The circle on one side of the pole is the ordinary inflection circle — coupler points travelling straight — carried into this frame. The circle on the other side is the inverse motion's: frame points travelling straight when the coupler is held. It is computed by differentiating the swap and, separately, by solving the coupler-held four-bar, and both routes put it at the first circle reflected through the pole, to 7e-15 on a radius of 4.45. The line through the pole is the common tangent. Dragging the crank angle moves both circles and they stay mirror images.

The frame seen from the coupler

Hold a four-bar's coupler still and let its frame move, and every construction of the curvature field has a counterpart. The frame's points that travel straight lie on the ordinary inflection circle reflected through the pole — found by differentiating the swap and, independently, by solving the coupler-held four-bar, both to 10⁻¹⁴ — and a point and the centre of curvature of its path trade places exactly. The inverse motion of one four-bar is the ordinary motion of another.

curvature · Curvature Which numbers have a size. Twelve quantities from eight fields of mechanism kinematics, each scaled by taking every length in its mechanism up and down together and fitting the power its value follows. A shape lands on zero, a length on one, a curvature on minus one, an area on two, and every row lands on an integer to 3.3e-11. The sorting is not a units argument — it is measured from each field's own library, by asking that library the same question. What it says is that most of what kinematics computes is a shape: a mobility, a Grashof class, a transmission angle, a contact ratio and a velocity ratio are all unchanged by making the machine bigger, so all of them are recoverable from a measurement that cannot recover a single length. The row worth stopping at is the tolerance band: held to a fixed ±0.01 it lands on minus one, because ±0.01 is a length and a bigger machine held to the same absolute tolerance is a better machine. Written as a percentage the same band lands on zero. One quantity, two drawing conventions, two different kinds of number.

Which numbers have a size

Take every length in a mechanism up and down together and fit the power each computed quantity follows. A transmission angle lands on zero, a coupler point's speed on one, a path curvature on minus one, an enclosed area on two — and a tolerance band held to a fixed ±0.01 lands on minus one, which nobody would guess.

metrology · Parameter

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Osculating circleCentrodeEuler savaryInflection circleInstantaneous centreMoving planePole tangentContact orderConjugate pointCoupler curveCubic of stationary curvatureBurmester point

All concepts