Qualitative kinematics of linkages

An important aspect of qualitative spatial reasoning is understanding mechanisms. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of motion for mechanical linkages. In particular, we describe how to analyze the behavior of a mechanism which has a movable axis. The basic idea of our approach is to represent relative motions of the link in terms of quadrants (qualitatively representing the direction relative to a global reference frame) and relative inclinations relative to the x-axis. Using this representation; we can derive all the possible motions of a system of linkages. This idea has been implemented and tested on several examples.