A new perspective towards decomposition of the generalized inertia matrix of multibody systems

Abstract

This paper presents a new perspective into the decomposition of the Generalized Inertia Matrix (GIM) of multibody systems with open kinematic architecture, serial or tree-type. Links and kinematic pairs are the two constituting elements of multibody systems. In this work, we propose to decompose a multi-branch multibody system into several kinematic modules. Each module is a set of serially connected links like a serial-chain system. Such a description allows one to obtain a block decomposition $\bar{\mathbf{U}}\bar{\mathbf{D}}\bar{\mathbf{U}}^{T}$ of the GIM where $\bar{\mathbf{U}}$ and $\bar{\mathbf{D}}$ are the block upper-triangular and diagonal matrices, respectively. The results provide a recursive inverse of the GIM on module-level. Many new perspectives leading to macroscopic purview of the complex multibody systems are provided. Empowered with the proposed decomposition, an inter- and intra-modular efficient and numerically stable recursive dynamics algorithm for forward dynamics and simulation was possible. While recursive expressions are derived for a four degree-of-freedom gripper, numerical results are shown for a spatial biped.