Industrial Practices and Examples Space Structures and Robots

Engineers responsible for the design and analysis of spacecraft attitude control and stabilization systems have been actively contributing to multibody system simulation software development efforts for more than 2 decades. In like manner engineers responsible for ground based mechanical system design and analysis have also been contributing for the same duration. During this period both groups have watched numerical integration methods and associated software develop. The mechanical system group has drawn from this work, while the aerospace group has relied almost exclusively on methods defined by Adams, Bashford, Runge, and Kutta, at the turn of the century. The intent of this contribution is to provide a rational for “why?”. This is done by first defining generic response characteristics of typical aerospace control of flexible structure problems and then listing common modeling and simulation needs. The needs list is restricted to those which have placed extraordinary demands on the numerical integration procedure. It is hoped that this aerospace user’s view of underlying requirements for numerical integration procedures will motivate the developers of emerging Order N multibody system simulation software to provide a sufficiently general set of numerical integration options.