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Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (Brown, H.T.) [On the
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Article  in  IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine · December 2012

DOI: 10.1109/MRA.2012.2221242

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 ON THE SHELF
Five Hundred and Seven
Mechanical Movements
By Henry T. Brown
F
ive Hundred and Seven Mechanical
Movements is a classic little jewel
of moving mechanisms, a valuable
resource for anyone who is
building robots. When first published in
1868, this book offered the pre-Internet
world a collection of the greatest moving
devices of the time, gathered together in
one small readable volume. Reissued in
1995, this book is still being used and
enjoyed. Although there is a great deal of
innovation happening now in software,
every robot that has to act in the world
requires mechanisms, and this book
provides them.
You will find reading this book
enjoyable, if just for its historical value
alone. In fact, you don’t have to have a
technical background to understand
the descriptions, although it will
remind those with engineering back-
grounds of school-days learning and
provide innovative variations that
might not have been thought of. On
the historical side, the book includes
the latest discoveries of the time, such
as C.R. Otis’s safety stop for the eleva-
tor and Pickering’s governor for a
steam engine.
However, the book also has a great
deal of useful information for the
robotics field. It includes 507 clearly
labeled and numbered pictures that
correspond to the numbered descrip-
tions of many of the important mech-
anisms used in robot construction.
Each mechanism is clearly drawn,
illustrating how the parts fit together.
Then, the picture’s description
explains how the mechanism works
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2012.2221242
Date of publication: 6 December 2012
88 • IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE
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and also tells what kind of motion is
produced. This method of organizing
lends itself well to be used as a quick
reference or inspiration during the
design process.
Some examples of the many types of
mechanisms you will find are brakes,
blowers, cams, compasses, couplings,
cranks, differential movements, ejec-
tors, engines, escapements, gauges,
gearing, governors, gyroscopes, various
types of hammers, hydraulics, hooks,
ladders, levels, pantographs, pendu-
lums, pinions, presses, pulleys, pumps,
rack and pinions, ratchets, regulators,
rollers, screws, shears, stops, toggles,
wheels, windlasses, and wipers—to
name just a few!
As some examples of the level of
detail included, there are 23 different
kinds of pulleys, each providing a
unique solution to a particular kind
of pulley movement you might need.
The gear section is quite detailed,
with many varieties for circular
motion, such as transmission of cir-
cular motion, reciprocating motion,
planetary motion, clutch boxes, and
transmitting different speeds. Each
of the categories listed above
includes multiple variations, so that
you can find a very specific design.
The book gives a few simple
numerical calculation methods at
times, but math is not emphasized.
The real value of this book is in see-
ing the clear drawings and reading
the precise explanations of exactly
how motion is expressed by each
type of mechanism. You will find
solutions to meet the many kinds of
movement situations you need for
your robot thanks to all of the fine-
grained variations this book includes.
And in the process of enjoying a
journey through history, you just
might find the creative solution you
are looking for. We highly recom-
• DECEMBER 2012
mend this practical and fun little
book!
—Reviewed by C. Alexander
Simpkins, Ph.D., and Annellen M.
Simpkins, Ph.D., San Diego, California
Design and Control
of Intelligent Robotic Systems
Edited by Dikai Liu, Lingfeng Wang,
and Kay Chen Tan
D
esign and Control of Intelligent
Robotic Systems is an edited
collection of advanced
research in robotics, part of
the series Studies in Computational
Intelligence. Robotics is a young field.
The advent of inexpensive powerful
computation, sensors, actuators, and
more powerful CAD/analysis packages
is opening doors that were previously
far beyond reach. More effective
theories and strategies are being rapidly
developed, as increasingly challenging
and complex problems are identified
and addressed. This book series is an
attempt to gather together and present
the newest work; this volume
emphasizes the design and control
of robots.
The book is composed of 21 chap-
ters, with topics ranging from an over-
view of computational intelligence,
various swarm optimizations for
groups of robots, behavioral learning
methods, path planning inspired by
emotional intelligence, heterogeneous
systems, and acquisition of neural
structure, to the design and control of a
rehabilitation robot (to list a few of the
many topics). The book is well written,
clearly laid out, and informative.
Each chapter is quite different
and self contained, and so it is not
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2012.2221251
Date of publication: 6 December 2012
1070-9932/12/$31.00©2012IEEE