Lists citations with abstracts for aerospace related reports obtained from world wide sources and announces documents that have recently been entered into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information Database.

A general purpose digital computer program was developed and designed to aid in the analysis of spacecraft attitude dynamics. The program provides the analyst with the capability of automatically deriving and numerically solving the equations of motion of any system that can be modeled as a topological tree of coupled rigid bodies, flexible bodies, point masses, and symmetrical momentum wheels. Two modes of output are available. The composite system equations of motion may be outputted on a line printer in a symbolic form that may be easily translated into common vector-dyadic notation, or the composite system equations of motion may be solved numerically and any desirable set of system state variables outputted as a function of time.

Multibody systems are the appropriate models for predicting and evaluating performance of a variety of dynamical systems such as spacecraft, vehicles, mechanisms, robots or biomechanical systems. This book adresses the general problem of analysing the behaviour of such multibody systems by digital simulation. This implies that pre-computer analytical methods for deriving the system equations must be replaced by systematic computer oriented formalisms, which can be translated conveniently into efficient computer codes for - generating the system equations based on simple user data describing the system model - solving those complex equations yielding results ready for design evaluation. Emphasis is on computer based derivation of the system equations thus freeing the user from the time consuming and error-prone task of developing equations of motion for various problems again and again.

Dynamics of multibody systems is of great importance in the fields of robotics, biomechanics, spacecraft control, road and rail vehicle design, and dynamics of machinery. Many research problems have been solved and a considerable number of computer codes based on multibody formalisms is now available. With the present book it is intended to collect software systems for multibody system dynamics which are well established and have found acceptance in the users community. The Handbook will aid the reader in selecting the software system which is most appropriate to his needs. Altogether 17 research groups contributed to the Handbook. A compact summary of important capabilities of these software systems is presented in tabular form. All authors dealt with two typical test examples, a planar mechanism and a spatial robot. Thus, it is very easy to compare the results and to identify more clearly the advantages of one or the other formalism.

Fifteen contributions provide an up-to-date treatment of issues in system modeling, system analysis, design and synthesis methods, and nonlinear systems. Coverage includes the application of multidimensional Laplace transforms to the modeling of nonlinear elements, a survey of customized computer algebra modeling programs for multibody dynamical systems, robust control of linear systems using a new linear programming approach, the development and testing of a new branch-and-bound algorithm fir global optimization using symbolic algebra techniques, and dynamic sliding mode control design using symbolic algebra tools.