Mechanical design and realization of automatic docking mechanism

Automatic docking technology is broadly used to the fields of aerospace and mechanical manufacturing. However, the technology is rather complicated to understand. In this paper, a effective automatic docking model based on the mechanical properties of the four-bar parallelogram linkage is proposed for teaching demostration. To make the docking mechanism keep equilibrium, the auxiliary link and leveling mechanism are added to the original four-bar parallelogram mechanism. In order to keep the two docking objects in the correct attitude during docking, movement status of the model is analyzed. Then the modeling, virtual assembling and motion simulation are realized in the software Solidworks. At last, a physical prototype is built, and the feasibility of the docking mechanism is verified by experiments.