pylinkage

A linkage builder written in Python. This package is made to create planar linkages and optimize them kinematically thanks to Particle Swarm Optimization. It is still an early work, so it should receive great changes in the future.

Usage

As of today, the code is segmented in three parts:

• geometry.py that module handles geometric primitives, such as circle intersections, distance claculation. It works in Euclidian space only. Aside from dist and sqr_dist functions, you might not use it directly.
• linkage.py this module describes joints and linkages
  • Due to the geometric approach, joints (instances of Joint object) are defined without links.
  • The Linkage class that will make your code shorter.
• optimizer.py proposes three optimizations based on three techniques:
  • The "exhaustive" optimization (exhaustive_optimization function) is a dumb optimization method, consisting or trying sequencially all positions. It is here for demonstration purposes only, and you should not use it if you are looking for an efficient technique.
  • The built-in Particle Swarm Optimizer (PSO). I started with it, so it offers a large set of useful options for linkage optimization. However, it is here for legacy purposes, and is much short than the PySwarms module.
  • PSO using PySwarms. We provide a wrapper function to PySwarm from ljvmiranda921, that will progressively be extended.

Requirements

Python 3, numpy for calculation, matplotlib for drawing, and standard libraries. If you do not want to use PySwarms feel free to use the built-in PSO.

Usage

Documentation coming soon.