animate to follow a path?

[andrew.nao]

is it possible to get an assembly to follow a certain path when animating it? in the picture below, when i animate the blue object i would like to make it follow a path of the yellow item. is this possible? if so can anyone provide me some guidance on how to do that? thanks

[admaiora]

Yes, itìs pretty long and a little tricky.

Here a video guide by Nisheeth Srivastava

Hope that can helps you.

[JDMather]

Attach the assembly here.

[dan_inv09]

admaiora,

Isn't that the one we established was a cheat in that it can only move the length of the straight segment? Nisheeth did not demonstrate a way to make one link go around the whole path - some links get pushed around the bend, but it is only because there are many separate bodies constrained together that we get the appearance of solving this problem. I once made something like a slat conveyor that looked like it was going around and around but it just looped an animation of the slats moving the distance from one to another.

andrew.nao,

This has been discussed many times before. Mostly in reference to the Project Lead the Way train problem. PLTW, Project Lead the Way, and train might be good search terms to start with - maybe chain and something like "animate path" could find some more.

The easiest way I can think of off hand would be to push it with some invisible part or surface. How far does it have to go?

[JDMather]

The OP's problem looks significantly more simple (even trivial - if the OP has Dynamic Simulation) than the YouTube link.

I would have posted 2 different solutions (one not using DS and one using DS) if the OP had at least indicated what version of Inventor they are using.