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 implemented 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.

A method is proposed for optimal synthesis of a grasper mechanism for circular objects. A single-DOF linkage-type grasper is developed considering the geometry of the target objects. The mechanism consists of successive coupled four-bar linkages and is capable of grasping circular objects with desirable range of diameter. The synthesis problem is formulated as a constraint optimization problem, while adaptive inertia weight particle swarm optimization (AIW-PSO) approach is used to carry out the solutions. Biomechanical and industrial applications for the mechanism are suggested and investigated by simulations as case studies. To demonstrate the effectiveness of AIW-PSO on the problem, a comparison with two other well-known metaheuristic algorithms namely PSO and genetic algorithm is done. The results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm and the performance of the mechanism.

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