Isomorphism Detection of Planar Kinematic Chains With Multiple Joints Using Information Theory

Isomorphism (structural similarity) of kinematic chains (KCs) of mechanisms is an important issue in the structural synthesis, which must be identified to avoid the duplicate structures. Duplication causes incorrect family size, i.e., distinct KCs with a given number of links (n) and degree of freedom (dof). Besides simple joints kinematic chains (SJKCs), multiple joints kinematic chains (MJKCs) are also widely used because of their compact size and the methods dealing with such KCs are few. The proposed method deals with two different structural invariants, i.e., primary structural invariants (provide only the necessary condition of isomorphism), such as link connectivity number (LCN) of all the links, link connectivity number of chain (CCN), joint connectivity number (JCN) of all the joints, and joint connectivity number of chain (JCNC), and secondary structural invariants (provide the sufficient condition of isomorphism), such as power transmission (P) and transmission efficiency (Te). Primary structural invariants are calculated using a new link-link connectivity matrix (LLCM), whereas secondary structural invariants are calculated using the concept of entropy of information theory. The method has been successfully tested for 10 and 11 links MJKCs (illustrative examples taken in the paper) and for the families of 18 MJKCs with 8 links, 2 MJs, 1-dof, and 3 independent loops; 22 MJKCs with 8 links, 1 MJ, 1-dof, and 3 independent loops; and 83 MJKCs with 9 links, 1 MJ, 2-dof, and 3 independent loops.