A symbolic approach to qualitative kinematics

摘要

An important problem for mechanism design and analysis is reasoning about the relationship between object shapes and their kinematic function. Such reasoning is difficult because of the unstructured influence of the shapes' metric dimensions. In this paper, we show how a qualitative kinematic analysis can be based solely on symbolic reasoning and evaluation of predicates on metric dimensions. This allows symbolic reasoning about kinematics without explicit numerical representations of object dimensions, and automatic generation of operators relating kinematic goals to shape modifications which may achieve them.