When you run a kinematic or position analysis in Mechanism Design, the software simulates the motion of your mechanism. You can choose which servo motors to use in these types of analyses and specify their start and end times during the analysis.

A kinematic or position analysis is a series of assembly analyses. However, when a point is reached during the analysis where it cannot successfully assemble the mechanism, the analysis stops and prompts you to continue. Depending on the settings you choose in the Settings dialog box, you can pause or continue an analysis upon failure while running.

Use a kinematic or position analysis to follow the motion of your model as imposed by servo motors. You can choose which servo motors to use during an analysis and can specify their start and end times during the analysis. If you are only interested in the motion of a portion of your model, you can use the body-locking or connection-locking options on the Preferences tab of the Analysis Definition dialog box to eliminate some of the allowed degrees of freedom.

Kinematic and position analyses are similar with one important difference. A kinematic analysis evaluates position, velocity, and acceleration of points or motion axes in your mechanism, while a position analysis measures position only. Therefore, any servo motor profiles that you define for a kinematic analysis must be differentiable. You can use geometric servo motors only in a position analysis.