Atlas of spherical four-bar mechanisms

An atlas or catalogue of mechanisms provides a useful aid in the synthesis of mechanisms for new applications. The atlas stores mechanisms together with their coupler paths. Fourier techniques can be used as a convenient means for representing, in normalized form, curves for planar mechanisms. This paper looks at the extension to spherical four-bar mechanisms. In particular, a means for projecting a spherical curve onto a plane is discussed which depends only on the geometry of the curve and not on the choice of world coordinate system.