In this tutorial, attendees will learn how to derive, simulate, control, and visualize the motion of a multibody dynamic system with Python tools. These methods and techniques play an important role in the design and understanding of robots, vehicles, spacecraft, manufacturing machines, human motion, etc. In particular, the attendees will develop code to simulate the motion of a human balancing while standing. This is an advanced tutorial and domain specific but we have found that a broad audience enjoys the topic. Attendees should be familiar with the basics of the SciPy stack, in particular NumPy, SciPy, SymPy, and IPython and have some familiarity with classical mechanics. Details In this tutorial, attendees will learn how to derive, simulate, and visualize the motion of a multibody dynamic system with Python tools. The tutorial will demonstrate an advanced symbolic and numeric pipeline for a typical multibody simulation problem. By the end, the attendees will have developed code to simulate the uncontrolled and controlled motion of a human balancing while standing. We will highlight the derivation of realistic models of motion with the SymPy Mechanics package. Then we will cover code generation to create fast numerical functions that can be used to simulate the system. The simulation results will be plotted and visualized with a 3D WebGL browser based tool. Finally, we will use packages for optimal control to develop a controller that mimics human standing and visualize these results.
Materials for this tutorial may be found here: https://github.com/pydy/pydy-tutorial-human-standing