Port-based Simulation of Flexible Multi-body Systems

This paper is devoted to simulation aspects of complex multi-body systems resulting from the interconnection of rigid and flexible links. This work is the natural complement of Macchelli et al. [2006, 2007a], in which only the mathematical modeling aspects of such kind of devices have been discussed. This paper tries to show how the port Hamiltonian framework can be instrumental also for the easy implementation of efficient simulations if proper packages able to deal with the a-causality of port-based modeling techniques are used. In fact, once the main components (i.e. rigid and flexible links and kinematic pairs) have been created, the complete model just follows by port interconnection in a plug-and-play fashion. Then, it is the simulation engine that solves the causality of the overall scheme and generate the simulation code. The main steps are illustrated in detail with an example.