Drive your career forward

What is the similarity between a car suspension, a robot, a railway vehicle and a human body? They are all complex mechanical systems composed of rigid bodies moving through articulated joints and submitted to forces and torques. Their study is the basis of the scientific field called multibody dynamics.

Whether you are an engineer designing a vehicle, a technician building a robot or setting up a prothesis, or a physiotherapist studying a human body motion, you might need to model and analyze the behavior of such multibody systems. You will learn that skill through this program.

Although an advanced program, your learning will be very progressive. It starts from the basic principles of Newtonian mechanics and then proposes to solve everyday applications of increasing complexity, using the free symbolic software Robotran (www.robotran.be) that generates the nonlinear equations in C, Python or MATLAB language.

The advantage of the symbolic generation is to be able to deal with realistic three-dimensional applications without having to generate the nonlinear equations of motion yourself, by hand or with a commercial numerical software.

The program successively covers the following topics:

• Recall and notations of Newtonian mechanics
• Principles of the multibody formalism
• Introduction to symbolic modeling (with Robotran)
• Numerical simulation of simple cases
• Modeling of external and internal forces
• Treatment of kinematic constraints
• Analysis techniques: direct/inverse kinematics, inverse dynamics, time integration, equilibrium and modal analysis.

Both courses combine videos, exercises, projects, continuous assessment and final exams so that you’ll gain maximum practice and deep learning in multibody system dynamics.