Modeling and simulation of mechanical systems - combination of a symbolic computation tool and M/sub A/TX

This paper illustrates an efficient way of modeling mechanical systems and performing the numerical simulation, by combinationally using symbolic and numerical computation tools. Since deriving the model and its minimal representation involves symbolic manipulations of equations, it must be handled by the symbolic computation tool. On the other hand, the simulation task requires numerical evaluations of the same object repeatedly; it can be efficiently processed by the numerical tool, especially when the values of objects are immediately available. The key point is how to export the symbolic objects easily into the numerical environment. The authors attempt to automatically generate source codes of the objects for the numerical tool, and to join two environments on the source level. The stabilization of the spherical pendulum is served as an example, and its modeling and the simulation using Mathematica/M/sub A/TX are included.