Time integration of rigid bodies modelled with three rotation parameters (Q2065572)

The article deals with numerical integration of rigid body kinematics. Euler angles are used to avoid singular points, that is configurations where the angular velocity determined by $\omega=G(\mathbf{q}).\mathbf{q}$, being \(\mathbf{q}\) the configuration coordinates, has the matrix \(G\) singular. Standard methods to avoid singularities use reparametrization of coordinates, but this increases computational complexity. Standard Lie groups integrators require additional memory and are difficult to implement in existing codes. In this approach, rotational coordinates are computed using incremental expressions for the rotation vector \(\mathbf{v}=\phi \mathbf{n}\), where \(\phi\) is the rotation angle and \(\mathbf{n}\) is the unit vector along the rotation axis of the body, without need to evaluate the rotation matrix and integrate the kinematic equations. Even if singular points are present in this approach, because the rules for building the incremental rotation vector are sorted into different cases according to the type of singularity, their treatment becomes simple and does not interrupt the integration of the motion, performed here via Lie groups time integration methods. It is explicitly constructed a procedure to determine the increment of Euler angles depending on the incremental rotation vector. Two numerical examples are presented. The first one considers the free rotation of a rigid body in a singular point. In this case the method is found to be comparable with standard Lie group methods. The second one analyzes the heavy top. Here the method requires fewer operations than standard Lie group methods but it does not perform better than other Euler parameters integration schemes. It is shown that the order of accuracy depends only in the accuracy of the ODE integrator.