Decoupling joint and elastic accelerations in deformable mechanical systems using non‐linear recursive formulations

The aim of this paper is to develop non‐linear recursive formulations for decoupling joint and elastic accelerations, while maintaining the non‐linear inertia coupling between rigid body motion and elastic deformation in deformable mechanical systems. The inertia projection schemes used in most existing recursive formulations for the dynamic analysis of deformable mechanisms lead to dense coefficient matrices in the equations of motion. Consequently, there are strong dynamic couplings between the joint and elastic coordinates. When the number of elastic degrees of freedom increases, the size of the coefficient matrix in the equations of motion becomes large. Consequently, the use of these recursive formulations for solving the joint and elastic accelerations becomes less efficient. In this paper, the non‐linear recursive formulations have been used to decouple the elastic and joint accelerations in deformable mechanical systems. The relationships between the absolute, elastic and joint variables and generalized Newton–Euler equations are used to develop systems of loosely coupled equations that have sparse matrix structure. By using the inertia matrix structure of deformable mechanical systems and the fact that joint reaction forces associated with elastic coordinates do represent independent variables, a reduced system of equations whose dimension is dependent of the number of elastic degrees of freedom is obtained. This system can be solved for the joint accelerations as well as for the joint reaction forces. The use of the approaches developed in this investigation is illustrated using deformable open‐loop serial robot and closed‐loop four‐bar mechanical systems. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.