Symbolic processing of multiloop mechanism dynamics using closed-form kinematics solutions (Q1371484)

A method to generate automatically the motion equations of multi-loop multibody systems is described. The aim is to find symbolic closed form solutions at position, velocity and acceleration level. The basic idea is to decompose the complex system into a set of independent simple loops, to generate the symbolic equations, and to reassemble the whole system. It turns out that closed form solutions are more efficient for mechanisms for which the constraint equations can be formulated as a system of recursively solvable polynomials of degree two. The described algorithm is impemented in a software package called SYMKIN, which is used to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method for two examples, namely a simple wheel suspension, and a rather complicated control mechanism of a helicopter.