The purpose of this study is to develop a program for the automatic drivation of the symbolic equations necessary for kinematic and dynamic analysis of spatial mechanism.
For this purpose, a symbolic manipulation package called MACSYMA is used. Every symbolic equation is formulated using relative joint coordinates to obtain a system equation that may be numerically solved with most efficiency. These equations are written in FORTRAN statements and linked to FORTRAN postprogram which is used for numerical analysis. Several examples are taken for comparison with a commercial package called DADS which is using Cartesian coordinate approach. Also, this symbolic formulation approach is compared with a conventional numerical approach for an example. The results show that this symbolic approach with relative coordinate system is most efficient in computational time among three and is recommended for the derivation of superelements frequently used.
