Biomedical Engineering Department Degrees Of Freedom (DOF)
AMNA AHMED IBRAHIM DAOUD
The Grbler-Kutzbach criterion given in (1) prescribes the i degrees of freedom
(DOF) of a 3D mechanism with L links and Pi joints: DOF = 6(L 1)5P1 4P2 3P3 2P4 P5. (1) This criterion is applicable to generic structures with no special symmetries that generate geometric singularities. Since there are no known non-generic structures that have been observed in experimental observations, we can assume, without loss of generality that protein structures do not contain such singularities. We compute the topological (connectivity) information, which is then parsed to extract the closed loops whose degrees of freedom are determined from equation Note that due to the fact that our kinematic model only contains revolute joints with one DOF, P2 = P3 = P4 = P5 = 0. Therefore, for a closed loop containing 6 links, i.e., L 6, the resulting number of degrees of freedom of a closed loop will be zero or less. This, in turn, means that the loop is kinematically over-constrained, and it can be considered a rigid body. Consequently, the loops having more than 6 links are under-constrained and hence flexible. For instance, a loop with 8 links and 8 joints has 2 degrees of freedom, which means controlling any 2 of its joints completely determines the angles in the other joints. In some cases these loops can be connected to each other and share one or more links. In such a case, DOF of the system cannot be calculated using (1). For non-rigid (NR) loops with shared links, we compute the number of DOF based on (2): Where (DOF)i is the number of degrees of freedom of the ith loop in the group of connected loops and Pj represents the degrees of freedom that are used by the j th shared joint. There is no restriction on which closed loops may be used as long as they collectively involve all links and joints. One can develop a proof of based on an analogy with geometric constraint equations.
Reference: J. Michael McCarthy, 21st Century Kinematics ,2012 NSF Workshop.