Topology and Constraint Analysis of Phase Change in the Metamorphic Chain and Its Evolved Mechanism

This paper presents a metamorphic kinematic pair extracted from origami folds in the context of mechanisms, its evolved metamorphic chain, and the novel metamorphic parallel mechanism. This paper starts from the generic issues of topological representation for metamorphic mechanism, leading to unified elementary matrix operation for presentation of topological variation. Phase matrix and augmented adjacency matrix are developed to present the topological state and geometry of metamorphic mechanism in an evolutionary process. The metamorphic kinematic pair has the ability of changing mobility to generate different motion patterns based on mobility change correlated with the link annex induced topological phase change. This paper then investigates topological variation of the metamorphic chain and the topological subphases are enumerated in accordance with structure evolution. Using the metamorphic chain as chain-legs, a multiloop metamorphic mechanism with ability of performing phase change and orientation switch is constructed. The disposition of constraints and geometric constraints induced bifurcated motion are analyzed based on screw theory. The topological variation of the metamorphic parallel mechanism is addressed and the foldability is verified by physical device. [DOI:10.1115/1.4002691]