Flexible Bodies with COTS Control Design and Physical Modeling Tools

A common problem in aerodynamic and astrodynamic engineering is accurate modeling of systems that combine flexible and rigid bodies with a controller. Mechanical and control simulators typically represent only rigid bodies and require preliminary transformation of flexible body problems into a suitable approximation. Analytical methods and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) flexible-body analysis tools can fill this gap. Easily available COTS multibody simulation packages can efficiently simulate rigid-body machines. They can also simulate mixed rigid-flexible systems if and when they can make dynamic use of flexible-body response data from the variety of available COTS finite-element analysis programs.