Constrained Multibody Dynamics With Python: From Symbolic Equation Generation to Publication

Symbolic equations of motion (EOMs) for multibody systems are desirable for simulation, stability analyses, control system design, and parameter studies. Despite this, the majority of engineering software designed to analyze multibody systems are numeric in nature (or present a purely numeric user interface). To our knowledge, none of the existing software packages are 1) fully symbolic, 2) open source, and 3) implemented in a popular, general, purpose high level programming language. In response, we extended SymPy (an existing computer algebra system implemented in Python) with functionality for derivation of symbolic EOMs for constrained multibody systems with many degrees of freedom. We present the design and implementation of the software and cover the basic usage and workflow for solving and analyzing problems. The intended audience is the academic research community, graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and those in industry analyzing multibody systems. We demonstrate the software by deriving the EOMs of a N-link pendulum, show its capabilities for LATEX output, and how it integrates with other Python scientific libraries — allowing for numerical simulation, publication quality plotting, animation, and online notebooks designed for sharing results. This software fills a unique role in dynamics and is attractive to academics and industry because of its BSD open source license which permits open source or commercial use of the code.

A Symbolic Formulation for Linearization of Multibody Equations of Motion

This paper presents a method for obtaining linearized state space representations of open or closed loop multibody dynamic systems. The paper develops a symbolic formulation for multibody dynamic systems which result in an explicit set of symbolic equations of motion. The symbolic equations are then used to perform symbolic linearizations. The resulting symbolic, linear equations are in terms of the system parameters and the equilibrium point, and are valid for any equilibrium point. Finally, a method is developed for reducing a linearized, constrained multibody system consisting of a mixed set of algebraic-differential equations to a reduced set of differential equations in terms of an independent coordinate set. An example is used to demonstrate the technique.