21st Century Kinematics—The 2012 NSF Workshop

21st Century Kinematics focuses on algebraic problems in the analysis and synthesis of mechanisms and robots, compliant mechanisms, cable-driven systems and protein kinematics. The specialist contributors provide the background for a series of presentations at the 2012 NSF Workshop. The text shows how the analysis and design of innovative mechanical systems yield increasingly complex systems of polynomials, characteristic of those systems. In doing so, it takes advantage of increasingly sophisticated computational tools developed for numerical algebraic geometry and demonstrates the now routine derivation of polynomial systems dwarfing the landmark problems of even the recent past. The 21st Century Kinematics workshop echoes the NSF-supported 1963 Yale Mechanisms Teachers Conference that taught a generation of university educators the fundamental principles of kinematic theory. As such these proceedings will provide admirable supporting theory for a graduate course in modern kinematics and should be of considerable interest to researchers in mechanical design, robotics or protein kinematics or who have a broader interest in algebraic geometry and its applications.

J. Michael McCarthy is the Henry Samueli Professor and Director of the Center for Engineering Science in Design at the University of California, Irvine, which supports the design and execution of team engineering projects across the School of Engineering. He completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University, and has taught at Loyola Marymount University and the University of Pennsylvania before joining UCI’s Mechanical Engineering Department in 1986. He has over 150 publications and three books including The Geometric Design of Linkages (Springer 2000, 2nd Ed. 2010). His research team is responsible for the Sphinx, Synthetica and MecGen software packages, which extend computer-aided design to spherical and spatial linkage systems and integrate this process with geometric modeling. He has presented tutorials on the design of linkages and robotic systems at ASME and IEEE conferences. His contributions in teaching were recognized by a 2010 UCI Teaching Excellence in Undergraduate engineering Award and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering’s 2009 Faribor Maseeh Teaching Award. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and has received the 2008 ASME Outstanding Service Award and the 2009 ASME Machine Design Award. In 2011, he received the ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Award for his research contributions.