Design and analysis of an overconstraint walking mechanism

In this thesis, a walking mechanism is developed from an overconstrained mechanism. The mechanism is composed of eight joints and eight links. The mechanism has one degree of freedom. In this study, the scaling, which is a characteristic feature of the mechanism, is focused on. Due to its scalability, it is shown how the walking path changes by scaling only three of the eight joints. At the beginning of the study, a kinematic analysis and dynamic simulation of the mechanism were performed. In the kinematic analysis, the position equations of the part of the mechanism in contact with the ground, i.e., the end point of the leg, were derived. Since the position equations depend on the parameters, eight different walking paths of the mechanism were obtained. By changing the parameters, the appropriate walking path was determined. Kinematic analysis was performed using Mathematica. In the dynamic simulation section, the walking path generated by the endpoint of the mechanism was obtained. The data obtained from the simulation was compared with the data obtained from the kinematic analysis. Autocad Inventor program was used in the dynamic simulation step. The mechanism parts were designed using Solidworks program. The designed mechanism parts were produced using a 3D printer. A test setup was designed to compare the manufactured mechanism with the data obtained from kinematic analysis and dynamic simulation. The test setup is designed to control the mechanism under different conditions. Using the video processing method in the test setup, the walking path and velocity graph of the part of the mechanism in contact with the ground were plotted. It was seen that the data obtained from dynamic simulation and kinematic analysis corresponded to each other. Thus, a new mechanism was introduced to the literature.