Singularity-free augmented Lagrangian algorithms for constrained multibody dynamics

After a general review of the methods currently available for the dynamics of constrained multibody systems in the context of numerical efficiency and ability to solve the differential equations of motion in singular positions, we examine the acceleration based augmented Lagrangian formulations, and propose a new one for holonomic and non-holonomic systems that is based on the canonical equations of Hamilton. This new one proves to be more stable and accurate that the acceleration based counterpart under repetitive singular positions. The proposed algorithms are numerically efficient, can use standard conditionally stable numerical integrators and do not fail in singular positions, as the classical formulations do. The reason for the numerical efficiency and better behavior under singularities relies on the fact that the leading matrix of the resultant system of ODEs is sparse, symmetric, positive definite, and its rank is independent of that of the Jacobian of the constraint equations. The latter fact makes the proposed method particularly suitable for singular configurations.