Multibody system

Summary

A multibody system is a mechanical system made of several bodies, usually rigid, connected by joints that restrict their relative motion. Robots, vehicles, linkages, the human skeleton and spacecraft with moving parts are modelled as multibody systems. Their equations of motion are large systems of ordinary differential equations, or differential-algebraic equations when the joints form closed loops. Multibody dynamics studies how to set up and solve these equations efficiently.