Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering (2018)40:469

https://doi.org/10.1007/s40430-018-1392-1(0123456789().,-volV)(0123456789().,-volV)

TECHNICAL PAPER

Optimal synthesis of a four-bar linkage for path generation using

adaptive PSO
Navid Eqra1 • Amir Hossein Abiri2 • Ramin Vatankhah1

Received: 13 July 2017 / Accepted: 14 August 2018

 The Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering 2018

Abstract
In this study, adaptive inertia weight PSO (AIW-PSO) is applied to the path synthesis problem in order to compare the
performance of an adaptive solution technique to the so far implemented ones and to investigate the effect of adaptability
on the efficiency of the solution method. The search space is expanded by considering both circuits of the linkage as a
candidate solution in formulating the objective function, and a new constraint is considered to account for the circuit
defect. Moreover, a new refinement technique and a modification on a previously suggested one are introduced to improve
the efficiency of the algorithm and a comparative study with previous results is also done. Results show that the imple-
mented method performs better than other solution methods in all three case studies. AIW-PSO shows its capability to be
used as a powerful method for solving design problems.

Keywords Adaptive PSO  Evolutionary algorithms  Four-bar linkage  Mechanism synthesis  Optimization 
Path generation

1 Introduction called precession points as the input to the problem. The

Three types of linkage synthesis as defined by Sandor and
Erdman [1] are function generation, path generation and
motion generation. Function generation is defined as the
correlation of an input function with an output function in a
mechanism. Path generation is identified as the control of a
point typically on the coupler in the plane such that it
follows some prescribed path and motion generation is
defined as the control of a line in the plane such that it
assumes some sequential set of prescribed positions. The
difference between the two latter cases is that in motion
generation, the orientation of the link is important.
As we focused on path generation, the problem is to
synthesize a linkage which coupler point traces a defined
path. The path can be approximated by successive points
Technical Editor: Victor Juliano De Negri.
& Ramin Vatankhah
rvatankhah@shirazu.ac.ir
1
School of Mechanical Engineering, Shiraz University, Shiraz,
Iran
2
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University
of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
problem cannot be solved by analytical methods as in [1]
for more than five precession points. Therefore, by intro-
ducing different objective functions, i.e., position error, the
application of numerical methods became convenient.
Among these methods, evolutionary strategies are more
popular and widely being used since they are easy to
implement and there is no need for deep knowledge of
search space and mathematical characteristics of the
objective function. It has been shown that using evolu-
tionary methods even results more accurate than the others.
In computer science, evolutionary algorithms are type of
metaheuristic algorithms that are mostly inspired from
biological treatment of living things and are widely used to
solve optimization problems. They are based on adopting
Darwinian principles and technically belong to the family
of trial-and-error problem solvers [2], i.e., genetic algo-
rithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and dif-
ferential evolution (DE). As real-world problems are
usually constraint, modifications must be done on the
objective function or the algorithm for the constraints to be
accounted for.
For a quick review on the background of using evolu-
tionary methods for linkage synthesis problem, Zhou and
Cheung [3] were one of the first researchers who applied a

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modified GA to the problem. Cabrera et al. [4] utilized an
algorithm based on GA and DE but different from each
one. Laribi et al. [5] represented a combined genetic
algorithm and fuzzy logic method (GA-FL). A novel
technique called the geometric centroid of precision points
was introduced by Shiakolas [6, 7] for optimization of four-
bar and six-bar linkages where DE was used to carry out
the solutions. GA, PSO and DE were implemented on the
problem by Acharyya and Mandal [8], and performance of
DE is found to be the best. They also suggested refinement
techniques for the algorithms to be more efficient in this
particular problem. Simulated annealing (SA) was first
used in Martinez-Alfaro [9] work. Ebrahimi and Payvandi
[10] employed parallel SA and imperialist competitive
algorithm (ICA) while considering a workspace limit for
the problem. They suggested a method for imposing Gra-
shof’s law to initial population to improve the algorithm
performances. Some researchers focused on synthesizing
multi-objective mechanisms. Cabrera et al. [11] employed
DE for multi-objective synthesis of planar mechanisms.
Nariman-Zadeh et al. [12] considered the tracking error and
transmission angle’s deviation from 90 as objective
functions and used a hybrid GA for the solution. Tracking
error, transmission angle’s deviation from 90 and maxi-
mum angular velocity ratio were considered as objective
functions by Khorshidi et al. [13]. A hybrid Pareto GA with
an adaptive local search was applied to obtain the solution.
Multi-path generation was considered by Chanekar and
Ghosal [14]. Erkaya and Uzmay [15] represented a neural-
genetic (NN-GA) approach for optimizing the mechanisms
considering joint clearances. The joint clearances were
modeled as mass-less links. A new error function was
introduced by Matekar and Gogate [16], and DE was used
for optimization. Lin [17] introduced a new algorithm
called hybrid GA-DE by combining DE with the real-val-
ued genetic algorithm (RGA) as the solution technique and
suggested a method to check the synthesized mechanism
for defects: drawing a simple sketch of the synthesized
linkage in SolidWorks and dragging the crank link.
MUMSA is another novel algorithm introduced by Cabrera
et al. [18] for implementing on this problem which resulted
in the most accurate among other previous works. In a
work by Kafash and Nahvi [19], a new objective function
based on geometry properties of the linkage was presented
using circular proximity function (CPF) and the optimiza-
tion was done using DE. Singh et al. [20] proposed the
synthesis of a crank-rocker mechanism as the basis of a
human knee exoskeleton. GA, PSO and teaching–learning-
based-optimization (TLBO) were applied to the problem,
and validations were done through simulation and
experiment.
The solution found may be unusable due to circuit,
branch or order (CBO) defects. A mechanism that must
123
change circuits to move from one desired position to the
other (referred to as a circuit defect) is not useful as it
cannot do so without disassembly and reassembly. Circuit
defects are fatal to linkage operation, but branch defects are
not [21].
The particle swarm optimization (PSO) is an evolu-
tionary algorithm first developed by Kennedy and Eberhart
[22] based on the social behavior of birds. As in other
evolutionary algorithms, PSO starts with a population of
random candidate solutions, and each one is treated as a
flying bird or a moving particle. Through running of the
algorithm, each bird is flown through the D-dimensional
search space of the problem to find the global extremum of
the objective function. Evolutionary algorithms are not
application-specific, and the relation between the algorithm
and the problem is limited to the objective function value.
Many variations were suggested by the researchers to
improve the performance of PSO.
The aim of this study is to implement adaptive inertia
weight PSO (AIW-PSO) algorithm on the path synthesis
problem to investigate the performance of an adaptive
solution method on this problem. This is done by com-
paring the obtained results with previous works which
results were the best among others. Although circuit defect
interrupts the linkage operation, none of the previous
evolutionary works considered the possibility of this
defect. This is accounted for in this study by introducing
and imposing a new constraint to the problem. Therefore,
our synthesized parameters need not be checked by another
mean for defects. We also improve the search space in this
study by considering both circuits of the linkage as a
candidate solution although the focus of the previous works
was only on the open configuration. Moreover, a new
refinement technique and a modification on a previously
suggested one are introduced to improve the efficiency of
the algorithm. That is, the contributions of this study can be
summarized as follows:
• The performance of an adaptive solution technique on
the linkage synthesis problem is investigated for the
first time.
• Circuit defects in the synthesized linkage are accounted
for by introducing and imposing a new constraint to the
problem.
• The search space is expanded by considering both
circuits of the linkage as a candidate solution.
• A new refinement technique and a modification on a
previously suggested one are introduced to improve the
efficiency of the algorithm.
.
Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering (2018)40:469 Page 3 of 11 469

2 Problem formulation Freudenstein’s equation [23] which gives an implicit rela-

tion between h2 and h3:
2.1 Problem variables K1 þ K2 cos h2 þ K3 cos h3 ¼ cosðh2  h3 Þ ð2Þ
 2 
Path generation problems are divided into two cases. where K1 ¼ r4  r32  r22  r12 =ð2r2 r3 Þ, K2 ¼ r1 =r3 , K3 ¼
Case 1: Path generation with prescribed timing. That is r1 =r2 further simplifications yield:
if timing of arrival of the coupler point at precession points pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
1 B  B2  4AC
is significant, i.e., a constant x motor controls the rotation h3 ¼ 2 tan ð3Þ
  2A
of the input link. In this case hi2 or a relation between
them is specified by designer. where A ¼ cos h2 ðK2 þ 1Þ þ K1  K3 , B ¼ 2 sin h2 ,
Case 2: Path generation without prescribed timing. C ¼ cos h2 ðK2  1Þ þ K1 þ K3
In the first case nine variables, namely (r1, r2, r3, r4, rct, The minus solution gives h3 for the open configuration,
rcn, x0, y0, h0), have to be optimized, whereas in the second and the positive solution gives h3 for the crossed configu-
  ration of the linkage, known as the two circuits of the
case we have additional variables hi2 to optimize by the
linkage. Moreover, if the discriminant under the radical is
number of precession points, so there are generally
negative, the solution is complex conjugate, which simply
‘‘9 ? Number of points’’ variables to optimize.
means that the link lengths chosen are not capable of
connection for the chosen value of the input angle h2 [21].
2.2 Mathematical model
Considering Z to be a vector of problem variables, the
coupler point coordinate can be expressed by:
Geometry of the linkage is considered as shown in Fig. 1.      0
Each link can be modeled as a position vector which along Cx0 ðZ Þ r cos h2 þ rct cos h3  rcn sin h3 x
¼ 2 þ 00
with the others can form a vector loop. This loop closes on Cy0 ðZ Þ r2 cos h2 þ rct sin h3 þ rcn cos h3 y0
itself making the sum of the vectors around the loop zero ð4Þ
[21]. Noting that the mechanism is of 1-DOF and any phase
of it can be defined by the crank angle h2. Multiplying Eq. (4) by a rotation matrix, the final
Taking X0 Y0 as local coordinate system and using com- equation which gives the coordinate of point C in the
plex number notation as the vector representation, the global CCS XY can be expressed by:
   
following equation can be derived: Cx ðZ Þ r cos h2 þ rct cos h3  rcn sin h3
¼ Rðh0 Þ 2
Cy ðZ Þ  r2 cos h2 þ rct sin h3 þ rcn cos h3
r2 eih2 þ r3 eih3  r4 eih4  r1 ¼ 0 ð1Þ
x
þ 0 ð5Þ
Equation (1) can be solved for h3 and h4 by equating its y
 0 
real and imaginary parts to zero; however, for our com- cos h  sin h
putational purposes, it is more efficient and straightforward where RðhÞ ¼
sin h cos h
to have h3 as an explicit function of h2. By doing some
mathematical simplifications on Eq. (1) we get to the 2.3 Constraints

The problem constraints which must be accounted for are

as follows:

2.3.1 Constraint 1 (Grashof’s defect)

Grashof’s condition is being represented as the following

inequality:
s þ lp þ q ð6Þ
where s and l stand for the shortest and the longest link
length, respectively, and p and q are lengths of the others. It
must be satisfied so at least one link can be capable of
making a full revolution with respect to ground plane. If no
link in the mechanism is capable of rotating fully, the
linkage is said to have Grashof’s defect [24].

Fig. 1 Geometry definition of the four-bar linkage

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2.3.2 Constraint 2 (order defect) Constraint 4 is imposed to the problem by checking

whether any position exists for h2 ¼ 0 and h2 ¼ p for the
The crank rotation must satisfy precession point’s pre- linkage which is defined by Z.
scribed sequential order. In another word it must rotate CW We modify the cost function as follows to handle
or CCW continuously. It can be stated as: Constraints 1 and 4. Constraints 2 and 3 are accounted for
remðjþ1;N Þ remðjþN;N Þ in the next section in optimization algorithm.
h2j \h2 \    \h2 ð7Þ  10
  10 Grashof or Circuit Defect
where h2j ¼ min hi2 and rem(i, j) is remainder of i divided fcost ¼ ð9Þ
f otherwise
by j.
  The problem summarizes to minimizing fcost. 1010 has
Notice that it is not necessary for h12 to be min hi2 as
Ebrahimi and Payvandy [10] stated. Their formulation been chosen as a large number to make fcost value
limits the search space for the problem. unacceptable.
When the sequence of occurrence of the several plane
positions of the solution linkage is not in desired order, the
mechanism is said to have order defect [24]. 3 Optimization algorithm

2.3.3 Constraint 3 (variables range) 3.1 Particle swarm optimization

Problem variables are limited to some prescribed bounds A brief history of particle swarm optimization was stated in
according to the construction limitations, etc. introduction.
Let us assume n particles each of which is defined by the
2.3.4 Constraint 4 (circuit defect) following parameters:
!
Xi;k is a D-dimensional vector which represents the
Considering mentioned constraints, four types of linkages
position of the ith particle in the kth iteration.
can be generated namely, double-crank, crank-rocker,
rocker-crank and double-rocker, while the two last ones are
not of our interest since the crank cannot rotate 360 and
the synthesized linkage encounters circuit defect.
The limiting values of the input angle can be obtained
!
Vi;k is also a D-dimensional vector which represents the
speed of the ith particle in the kth iteration.
The following parameters are saved during run of the
algorithm:
by setting the discriminant under the radical of Eq. (3) to ! ! !
zero. Then, the inequalities that guarantee the full rotation Pi;k ¼ Xi;j where Xi;j minimizes f for all j  k ð10Þ
of crank can be derived as in [25]. But we deal with this !
Pi;k is the best position the ith particle has been in, until the
constraint differently as discussed further.
kth iteration—also known as personal best position.
2.4 Cost function ! ! !
Gk ¼ Pi;k where Pi;k minimizes f for all 1  i  n ð11Þ
The cost function is considered as the sum of the tracking
errors between the precession points and the positions of
the coupler point generated by the synthesized mechanism
 
for a set of input angles hi2 . To improve the search space,
!
Gk is the best position ever reached until the kth itera-
tion—also known as global best position.
In each iteration, the following parameters can be
calculated:
it is reformulated as follows in order to give a chance to ! ! !
Xi;kþ1 ¼ Xi;k þ Vi;kþ1 ð12Þ
both circuits of the linkage for being a candidate solution:
! ! ! ! !
!
(  Vi;kþ1 ¼ Vi;k þ c1 rand1  Pi;k  Xi;k þ c2 rand2
X N
2
2  ! !

i i
f ¼ min Cx;open ðZ Þ  Cpx þ Cy;open ðZ Þ  Cpy ;  Gk  Xi;k ð13Þ
i¼1
) ( ! !
!

N 
X
2
2 
Cx;crossed ðZ Þ  i
Cpx i
þ Cy;crossed ðZ Þ  Cpy ! Pi;k ; f Pi;k \f Xi;kþ1
Pi;kþ1 ¼ ! ð14Þ
i¼1 Xi;kþ1 ; otherwise
ð8Þ
where the symbol  denotes element-by-element vector
i
where Cpj is the j component of the ith precession point multiplication, f ðx1 ; x2 ; . . .; xD Þ is the function that should
coordinate Cpi . be minimized, and rand1 ; rand2 are random D-dimensional
vectors between 0 and 1.

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Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering (2018)40:469
Fig. 2 Implemented AIW-PSO flow chart
It is now clear that in each iteration, each bird is trying
to get closer to its own best position and the whole swarm’s
best position. Parameters c1, c2 are acceleration constants
that model sociality of flying birds, i.e., if c1 = 1, c2 = 0,
the algorithm turns into social-only model [26].
3.2 Variations of PSO
The balance between global and local search through the
course of a run is one of the most important factors that
make an optimization algorithm successful [27]. Shi and
Eberhart [28] suggested the following formula for calcu-
lation of each particle’s velocity:
Page 5 of 11 469
reasonable number of iterations. Generally, three types of PSO-
based algorithms have been suggested based on their inertia
weight value. The first group uses constant or random inertia
weight value. The second group uses time-based inertia weight,
and the third group uses feedback parameters to make inertia
weight adaptive. Different feedback parameters were suggested
in [29–33]. In this study, the AIW-PSO suggested by Nickabadi
et al. [26] which showed its power in solving traditional opti-
mization problems is employed. The objective is to investigate
the effect of adaptability and compare the performance of an
adaptive version of a well-established and simply structured
algorithm with its non-adaptive version and the other successful
algorithms in the field of mechanism synthesis which is of
! ! ! ! !
! practical importance.
Vi;kþ1 ¼ wVi;k þ c1 rand1  Pi;k  Xi;k þ c2 rand2
! !
!
 Gi;k  Xi;k Xi;kþ1 3.3 AIW-PSO description
! !
¼ Xi;k þ Vi;kþ1
To make inertia weight adaptive, the following parameters
ð15Þ are defined [26]:
( !
!

They added a new parameter, called inertia weight (w), and 1; f Pi;k \f Pi;k1
claimed that increasing inertia weight facilitates a global search Sði; kÞ ¼ ð16Þ
0; otherwise
while decreasing it facilitates a local search. In practice, they
used a range of constant w values and showed that with w in
range of [0.8 1.2], PSO finds the global extremum in a

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Pn
i¼0 Sði; kÞ
PS ðkÞ ¼ ð17Þ
n
where n is the number of particles and PS is the feedback
parameter which equals to the percentage of particles
which have had an improvement in their fitness in the last
iteration.
Then, a linear function is used to calculate w(k) as
follows:
wðkÞ ¼ ðwmax  wmin ÞPs ðkÞ þ wmin ð18Þ
To improve exploration, at the end of each iteration a
mutated version of best particle is produced and replaced
with the worst particle. Mutated particle is produced by
adding a Gaussian noise with zero mean to a random
dimension of the best particle.
3.4 Refinement techniques
As we stated before, the crank rotation must satisfy target
points prescribed sequential order to avoid linkage order
defect. Therefore, the angle array must be a circular/rotated
array. As in [8], in case of unordered angles, array is sorted
to calculate error function. An improvement can be made
by checking all rotated permutations and return the one
which results in less cost function value.
To make exploration more effective, all variables are
scaled to a fixed range of [a b]. Therefore, all variables
have equal bounds. This can make PSO explore variables
with tight bounds more accurate and variables with loose
bounds faster since the velocities would be calculated in a
more reasonable way.
Figure 2 and Table 1 show the implemented AIW-PSO
pseudo-code and parameters, respectively.
3.5 Time complexity
Letting n be the number of particles, k be the number of
iterations and D be the number of dimensions, the com-
plexity of AIW-PSO is O(nkD). Although the complexity is
just the same as simple standard PSO, and less than most of
other evolutionary algorithms, it is shown that AIW-PSO
can find a more accurate solution in comparison with other
PSO variants with the same number of particles and iter-
ations [26].
4 Case studies
Three case studies are selected from the literature to test
the performance of the implemented AIW-PSO on path
synthesis problem. Variables are of type length; thus, any
identical unit applicable to express length can be consid-
ered for them, i.e., cm and inch. Moreover, since the cost
function is defined as tracking error, the same unit accounts
for its value. Angles are expressed in radians.
4.1 Case 1: 6 precession points
without prescribed timing
This case was first proposed by Cabrera et al. [4]. The
synthesized mechanism is to trace a straight line. That is,
the problem data are as follows:
Variable ranges: r1 ; r2 ; r3 ; r4 2 ½5; 60; rct ; rcn ; x0 ; y0 2
½60; 60; h0 ; hi2 2 ½0; 2p
Precession points: Cpi ¼ fð20; 20Þ; ð20; 25Þ; ð20; 30Þ;
ð20; 35Þ; ð20; 40Þ; ð20; 45Þg
Variables vector can be expressed by: Z ¼ ½r1 ; r2 ; r3 ;
r4 ; rct ; rcn ; x0 ; y0 ; h0 ; h12 ; h22 ; h32 ; h42 ; h52 ; h62 .
4.2 Case 2: 6 precession points with prescribed
timing
This case, first studied by Acharyya and Mandal [8], is to
optimize 9 variables with the following given data. Pre-
cession points are arranged so that they make an approxi-
mately semi-circular arc for the mechanism to trace.
Variable ranges: r1 ; r2 ; r3 ; r4 2 ½5; 50; rct ; rcn ; x0 ; y0 2
½50; 50; h0 2 ½0; 2p

Table 1 Implemented AIW-

Parameter Value
PSO parameters Table 2 Comparative results fcost for case studies
C1 2
Method Case 1 Case 2 Case 3
C2 2
wlow 0.5 GA [8] 1.21216 10.0553 2.28127
whigh 1 PSO [8] 0.298619 5.54723 1.971004
Vmax 5 DE [8] 0.0150652 5.52068 1.952326
Number of particles 100 Hybrid GA-DE [17] 7.37065 9 10-4 2.58285 0.0310339
-4
Max. iteration 1000 MUMSA [18] 2.05680 9 10 2.58035 0.00476646
varlow 0 ICA [10] 0.002 2.59983 –
varhigh 100 AIW-PSO (this study) 9.66148 9 10-8 2.23138 0.00296723

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Table 3 Synthesized
Parameter Case 1 Case 2 Case 3
parameters for case studies
AIW-PSO MUMSA AIW-PSO MUMSA AIW-PSO MUMSA

r1 11.0589 31.7882 60.0000 50 54.7218 79.5160

r2 5.73008 8.2046 5.00000 5 8.53201 9.7239
r3 37.0136 24.9321 7.06916 7.0310 31.4848 45.8425
r4 35.3495 31.3859 58.1241 48.1341 33.2131 51.4328
rct 25.5468 34.1937 16.8655 16.976687 0.423061 8.2139
rcn 40.5565 14.4156 13.0576 12.9521 5.99960 -2.9539
x0 -22.2008 -6.3665 11.8936 12.1974 7.30574 2.0211
y0 26.7225 56.8367 -16.0037 -15.9982 4.88892 13.2165
h0 0.354798 4.0159 6.28318 0.0428 0.0965143 5.5969
h12 2.16750 1.3665 – – 0 0.6376
h22 2.62985 2.3307 – – 0.714643 1.3255
h32 3.08829 2.8710 – – 1.42348 2.0080
h42 3.54934 3.3945 – – 2.12970 2.6955
h52 4.01092 3.9709 – – 2.80325 3.3845
h62 4.47837 4.9634 – – 3.47410 4.0829
h72 – – – – 4.14885 4.7984
h82 – – – – 4.85494 5.5117
h92 – – – – 5.56444 6.2127
h10
2
– – – – 6.28318 0.6371
Config. Crossed Open Open Open Crossed Open
fcost 9.66148 9 10-8 2.05680 9 10-4 2.23138 2.58035 0.00296723 0.00476646

4.3 Case 3: 10 precession points

without prescribed timing

The last case we study is proposed by Acharyya and

Mandal [8] too. Precession points approximate an elliptical
path with minor and horizontal major axis of 16 and 20
units, respectively, and the center at (10, 10).
Variable ranges: r1 ; r2 ; r3 ; r4 2 ½5; 50; rct ; rcn ; x0 ; y0 2
½50; 50; h0 2 ½0; 2p
Precession points: Cpi ¼ fð20; 10Þ; ð17:66; 15:142Þ;
ð11:736; 17:878Þ; ð5; 16:928Þ; ð0:60307; 12:736Þ; ð0:60307;
7:2638Þ; ð5; 3:0718Þ; ð11:736; 2:1215Þ; ð17:66; 4:8577Þ;
ð20; 10Þg

5 Results and discussion

Fig. 3 Representation of the four-bar linkages synthesized by
MUMSA (blue) and AIW-PSO (red) for case 1 (color figure online) Table 2 represents a comparison between the evolutionary
algorithms which resulted excellently in this particular
Precession points: Cpi ¼ fð0; 0Þ; ð1:9098; 5:8779Þ; problem so far. Synthesized parameters and corresponding
ð6:9098; 9:5106Þ; ð13:09; 9:5106Þ; ð18:09; 5:8779Þ; ð20; 0Þg position errors for the case studies are shown in Table 3 as
 a result of implementing AIW-PSO (this study) and
Timing: hi2 ¼ p6 ; p3 ; p2 ; 2p 5p
3 ; 6 ;p MUMSA [18] which had the best results among other
So, Z ¼ ½r1 ; r2 ; r3 ; r4 ; rct ; rcn ; x0 ; y0 ; h0 
methods so far. Four-bar linkages drawn by the synthesized
parameters in case 1 are represented in Fig. 3.

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Fig. 4 Obtained coupler curves using different methods for case 1

Fig. 5 Obtained coupler curves using different methods for case 2

Results have been truncated to six significant figures, are shown in Figs. 4, 5 and 6 together with the curves
and each solution is the best obtained among ten times run obtained using other methods for the case studies.
of the algorithm. Obtained coupler curves using AIW-PSO Hybrid GA-DE [17] was employed and reported with
two different algorithm parameters; for our comparison

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Fig. 6 Obtained coupler curves using AIW-PSO for case 3
purpose, the more identical one to other algorithms with
k = 1 and population size = 100 is selected for comparing
the results. The population size and the iterations of all
algorithms in Table 2 are as in the implemented AIW-PSO.
The reported errors by Acharyya and Mandal [8] are the
square root of the actual position error. Thus, the stated
errors in Table 2 are the square of what they have reported
in order to be consistent with our cost function.
Fig. 7 Typical response of
different algorithms for case 2
[8] together with AIW-PSO
Page 9 of 11 469
As Table 3 represents, the synthesized parameters by
both algorithms in case 2 are nevertheless identical. Con-
sidering this and the results of other algorithms on this case
study which are shown in Table 2, it can be concluded that
the global minima of the cost function is reached in this
case. However, AIW-PSO was obviously more successful
in searching the region of global minima with the same
particle number and iteration as other algorithms. It hap-
pens just because of its adaptability in tuning the inertia
weight according to the search history.
Figures 7 and 8 show the best cost function value
plotted against algorithm loop iteration demonstrating the
rate of convergence of AIW-PSO in comparison with other
algorithms.
For case 3, the result of AIW-PSO is much better than
GA, PSO and DE. However, although MUMSA [18] and
hybrid GA-DE [17] performed well on this case, the syn-
thesized mechanism by hybrid GA-DE encounters order
defect according to the reported parameters, whereas the
defected solutions were neglected by our approach. By
investigating the synthesized parameters in this case, it can
be seen that they are not rather identical as in case study 2.
Therefore, AIW-PSO was more successful in finding the
region in which global minima is likely to happen. As a
result, the obtained error is better than the reported error
using other methods.
123
469 Page 10 of 11 Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering (2018)40:469
Fig. 8 AIW-PSO response for case studies
As Table 2 represents, the most accurate result belongs
to AIW-PSO in all three case studies.
The accuracy of the mechanism may be decreased by
the errors rising through manufacturing and installation
processes, etc. Moreover, other effects such as joint
clearances can reduce the accuracy too. Thus, trying to find
the most accurate solution in design/synthesis procedure
can help in lowering the effect of subsequently produced
errors.
As Fig. 3 represents, the linkage by AIW-PSO has
narrower base while having a larger coupler link. In con-
trast, the linkage by MUMSA [18] has wider base while
having a smaller coupler link. The judgment that which one
is more feasible is up to the designer and depends on the
priority of the workspace and accuracy in the problem at
hand. However, neither this work nor Cabrera et al. [18]
considered the workspace of the mechanism in their syn-
thesis method.
6 Conclusions
The performance of PSO improved significantly as the
result of making its parameters adaptive with the problem
and using the introduced refinement methods. Results
showed that the implemented AIW-PSO performs better
than the so far introduced methods for path synthesis
problem from the view point of accuracy, time and ease of
implementation. The crossed configuration of the linkage
showed its potential to be an appropriate solution, and the
synthesized linkages are defect-free due to the imposed
constraints. That is, AIW-PSO showed a great capability to
be used for solving practical problems. The method studied
in this paper can be used for function/motion generation
problem by doing minor modifications on it. AIW-PSO can
also be used as solution technique in online practical
optimization problems as well as in offline ones, especially
in robotic control because of its fast convergence rate.
123
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