Simulation, Animation, and Control of Multi-Body Mechanisms

A three-dimensional graphical environment, called the Multi-Body Simulator or MBSim, has been developed for the simulation, animation, and control of multi-body mechanisms with or without sensors. The mechanisms can be composed of holonomic links. such as revolute and prismatic links, and nonholonomic links. such as tricycle like vehicles. This graphical environment is applied to tasks in the nuclear industry. The graphical environment has been designed and programmed in an object oriented fashion to enable a building block approach to creating multi-body mechanism models. The uses in the nuclear industry, attributes of this graphical environment, benefits of object oriented design, and aspects of simulation and animation with the system will be discussed