AAS 97-720
EQUATIONS OF MOTION FOR AN N-LINK PLANAR SYSTEM FOR SIMULATION AND OPTIMIZATION
B.L. Biswell and J. Puig-Suari - Arizona State University
Abstract
This paper presents a compact formulation of the equations of motion for a general two-dimensional, hinged, N-link planar body derived using Lagrange's method. The resulting equations are assembled in such a fashion that an arbitrary number of links can be modeled without any changes to the computer code used for simulation. Optimization and trade-off studies varying the number of links are thus simplified by re-using the same core code. This also reduces analysis time of new systems as the code can be incorporated into these new applications unchanged. This formation can be extended to any 3D binary-tree system.