To begin the synthesis of a linkage to accomplish our goals we turned to the aerospace industry for inspiration. We found that at the very least, the overall design of modern "hide-in-armrest" traytable on airplanes mimic the function we strove to accomplish ("Center console stored extensible tray table" Patent US 6347590 B1).
In our case however, we felt that it would be best to, if at all possible, keep our mechanism in a single plane. Thus, instead of folding back such as in Fig. 4, we choose to implement a rotation around our armrest-axis.
