Some Applications of Automatic Differentiation to Rigid, Flexible, and Constrained Multibody Dynamics

In this paper, we discuss several applications of automatic differentiation to multibody dynamics. The scope of this paper covers the rigid, flexible, and constrained dynamical systems. Particular emphasis is placed on the development of methods for automating the generation of equations of motion and the simulation of response using automatic differentiation. We also present a new approach for generating exact dynamical representations of flexible multibody systems in a numerical sense using automatic differentiation. Numerical results will be presented to detail the efficiency of the proposed methods.