Formulation of Kinematic Joints and Rigidity Constraints in Multibody Dynamics using a Lie Group Approach

The matrix Lie group approach allows to formulate and solve the equations of motion of a multibody system in a parametrization-free framework. The kinematic joints and the rigidity constraints should also be formulated as constraint equations on the Lie group. Working on the Special Euclidean group SE(3), we introduce a method to obtain appropriate vectorial constraint equations in terms of mixed coordinates. Moreover, we present an absolute coordinates formulation, based on an relative coordinates elimination method, so that the minimum number of constraint equations necessary to describe the joints is used