Reaction Solvability Analysis Using Natural Coordinates

In over-constrained mechanisms, all the joint reactions cannot be solved uniquely based solely on rigid body assumptions. However, a few joint reactions may be uniquely solvable, and an approach termed as reactions solvability analysis (RSA), in this paper, can be used to find such uniquely solvable joint reactions. Existing work has implemented RSA algorithms using absolute coordinates. In this work, the RSA algorithm is used with natural coordinates and this is found to be more efficient for finding uniquely solvable joint reactions. To use natural coordinates for RSA, they need to be modified and this is discussed in this work.