This paper deals with mechanism (including kinematic chain) identification with respect to topology. It is argued in the paper that the meaning of mechanism topology should have certain different abstraction levels in terms of different mechanism design tasks or processes. As such, four abstraction levels of mechanism topology are proposed and described. A new approach to mechanism topology identification with consideration of all these proposed levels is presented and described. One of the main features of this new approach is to extend the existing incident degree code approach. Examples are given to exhibit its effectiveness, compared with some existing methods.
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