In the physical science of dynamics, rigid-body dynamics studies the movement of systems of interconnected bodies under the action of external forces. The assumption that the bodies are rigid (i.e. they do not deform under the action of applied forces) simplifies analysis, by reducing the parameters that describe the configuration of the system to the translation and rotation of reference frames attached to each body. This excludes bodies that display fluid, highly elastic, and plastic behavior.
The dynamics of a rigid body system is described by the laws of kinematics and by the application of Newton's second law (kinetics) or their derivative form, Lagrangian mechanics. The solution of these equations of motion provides a description of the position, the motion and the acceleration of the individual components of the system, and overall the system itself, as a function of time. The formulation and solution of rigid body dynamics is an important tool in the computer simulation of mechanical systems.
Planar rigid body dynamics
If a system of particles moves parallel to a fixed plane, the system is said to be constrained to planar movement. In this case, Newton's laws (kinetics) for a rigid system of N particles, P, i=1,...,N, simplify because there is no movement in the k direction. Determine the resultant force and torque at a reference point R, to obtain
where r denotes the planar trajectory of each particle.
The kinematics of a rigid body yields the formula for the acceleration of the particle P in terms of the position R and acceleration A of the reference particle as well as the angular velocity vector ω and angular acceleration vector α of the rigid system of particles as,
For systems that are constrained to planar movement, the angular velocity and angular acceleration vectors are directed along k perpendicular to the plane of movement, which simplifies this acceleration equation. In this case, the acceleration vectors can be simplified by introducing the unit vectors e from the reference point R to a point r and the unit vectors , so
This yields the resultant force on the system as
and torque as
where and is the unit vector perpendicular to the plane for all of the particles P.
Use the center of mass C as the reference point, so these equations for Newton's laws simplify to become
where is the total mass and I is the moment of inertia about an axis perpendicular to the movement of the rigid system and through the center of mass.
Rigid body in three dimensions
Orientation or attitude descriptions
Several methods to describe orientations of a rigid body in three dimensions have been developed. They are summarized in the following sections.
Euler angles
The first attempt to represent an orientation is attributed to Leonhard Euler. He imagined three reference frames that could rotate one around the other, and realized that by starting with a fixed reference frame and performing three rotations, he could get any other reference frame in the space (using two rotations to fix the vertical axis and another to fix the other two axes). The values of these three rotations are called Euler angles. Commonly, is used to denote precession, nutation, and intrinsic rotation.
Tait–Bryan angles
These are three angles, also known as yaw, pitch and roll, Navigation angles and Cardan angles. Mathematically they constitute a set of six possibilities inside the twelve possible sets of Euler angles, the ordering being the one best used for describing the orientation of a vehicle such as an airplane. In aerospace engineering they are usually referred to as Euler angles.
Orientation vector
Euler also realized that the composition of two rotations is equivalent to a single rotation about a different fixed axis (Euler's rotation theorem). Therefore, the composition of the former three angles has to be equal to only one rotation, whose axis was complicated to calculate until matrices were developed.
Based on this fact he introduced a vectorial way to describe any rotation, with a vector on the rotation axis and module equal to the value of the angle. Therefore, any orientation can be represented by a rotation vector (also called Euler vector) that leads to it from the reference frame. When used to represent an orientation, the rotation vector is commonly called orientation vector, or attitude vector.
A similar method, called axis-angle representation, describes a rotation or orientation using a unit vector aligned with the rotation axis, and a separate value to indicate the angle (see figure).