Simulation of Rigid Body Dynamics in Matlab

This report presents a simulator of rigid dynamics of a single body in Matlab. The focus was on the conservation of Angular-Momentum and we assume that we’re in the center of mass frame with no external forces. We show that the simulation agrees with the analytical solution for the case of a body with two equal moments. Qualitatively, we also show that the model exhibits the expected behavior when the moments of inertia are all different. We extend the model to include applied torques, but the torque must be calculated analytically through some other means. We show the numerical solution of the example of a rigid body with two rockets on each side of an ellipsoid, aimed to provide equal and opposite forces, and thus some total torque about the z-axis in the inertial frame.