Symbolic Formulation of a Path-Following Joint for Multibody Dynamics
We present a specialized multibody joint that constrains motion to a spatial path. The joint is used in the reduction of 1 degree-of-freedom systems with complex kinematics. Example applications of the joint are: the reduction of vehicle suspension systems, or the representation of biological joints. The new joint is implemented in the graph-theoretic symbolic multibody modeling environment of MapleSim and is formulated in such a way that a single ordinary differential equation is used to describe the resulting kinematic pair. A particle moving along a planar semi-circular path was chosen as the first example for successful validation of the new joint since a simple closed-form solution in terms of the path length exists. To represent arbitrary curves, the path must first be parameterized in terms of its path length. Next, a differentiable mathematical definition of the curve must be generated. B-splines are generated to define the path. For best performance we minimize the number of knots in the splines and find their optimal locations. Using the spline fitting approach, a planar parabolic path is generated and used to further analyze the performance of our implementation.