A Recursive Formulation for Real-Time Dynamic Simulation of Mechanical Systems

A new recursive algorithm for real-time dynamic simulation of mechanical systems with closed kinematic loops is presented. State vector kinematic relations that represent translational and rotational motion are defined to simplify the formulation and to relieve computational burden. Recursive equations of motion are first derived for a single loop multi-body system. Faster than real-time performance is demonstrated for a closed loop manipulator, using an Alliant FX/8 multiprocessor. The algorithm is extended to multi-loop, multi-body systems for parallel processing real-time simulation in companion papers [1, 2] where performance of the algorithm on a shared memory multi-processor is compared with that achieved with other dynamic simulation algorithms.