Multibody Dynamics

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Overview

The field models interconnected bodies—from robot arms and closed-chain mechanisms to cables and spacecraft—to predict motion, forces, and actuator loads. Common approaches include Lagrangian and Newton–Euler equations, Featherstone’s recursive algorithms, and constrained solvers for joint loops and contact; differentiable simulators and learned graph models extend these tools to optimization and data-driven prediction. Work spans contact-rich robot control, GPU-batched simulation, and comparisons with physical robot or mechanism measurements. A central challenge is balancing physical fidelity, especially for friction and changing contacts, with the speed and reliable gradients needed for large-scale learning and control.

Latest papers

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42 papers8 papers in the last four weeks, up 14% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Forward Dynamics of Variable Topology Mechanisms - The Case of Constraint Activation

    Apr 21, 2026Andreas MuellerDynamical SystemsMultibody Dynamics

    Institute of Robotics, Johannes Kepler University Altenbergerstr. 69, 4040 Linz, Austria

  2. frax: Fast Robot Kinematics and Dynamics in JAX

    Apr 5, 2026Daniel Morton, Marco PavoneRobot KinematicsRobotics

    Daniel Morton and Marco Pavone are with the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics & Astronautics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305.

  3. A Dynamic Toolkit for Transmission Characteristics of Precision Reducers with Explicit Contact Geometry

    Apr 2, 2026Jiacheng Miao, Chao Liu, Qiliang Wang +2Dynamical SystemsMultibody Dynamics

    Intelligent Equipment Division, CRRC Qishuyan Institute Co., Ltd, Changzhou, 213011, China · School of Mechanical Engineering, Dalian Jiaotong University, Dalian, 116028, China · Research Institute, CRRC Qishuyan Institute Co., Ltd, Changzhou, 213011, China

  4. Strain-Parameterized Coupled Dynamics and Dual-Camera Visual Servoing for Aerial Continuum Manipulators

    Mar 24, 2026Niloufar Amiri, Farrokh Janabi-SharifiAerial ManipulationAerial Robotics

    Department of Mechanical, Industrial, and Mechatronics Engineering, Toronto Metropolitan University, ON, Canada.

  5. Symmetry-Reduced Physics-Informed Learning of Tensegrity Dynamics

    Mar 18, 2026Jing Qin, Muhao ChenPhysics-Informed MLStructural Mechanics

    Department of Mathematics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY · Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Houston, TX

  6. Kamino: GPU-based Simulation of Rigid Multi-Body Physics with Kinematic Loops

    Mar 17, 2026Vassilios Tsounis, Guirec Maloisel, Christian Schumacher +6Robotics SimulationPhysics-Based Simulation

    Disney Research, Zurich, Switzerland · NVIDIA, Zurich, Switzerland

  7. Dual Quaternion Based Contact Modeling for Fast and Smooth Collision Recovery of Quadrotors

    Mar 16, 2026Valentin Gaucher, Wenlong ZhangRobot Failure RecoveryQuadrotor Control

    School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, Arizona State University, Mesa, AZ, 85212, USA.

  8. ComFree-Sim: A GPU-Parallelized Analytical Contact Physics Engine for Scalable Contact-Rich Robotics Simulation and Control

    Mar 12, 2026Chetan Borse, Zhixian Xie, Wei-Cheng Huang +1Robotics SimulationPhysics-Based Simulation

    Intelligent Robotics and Interactive Systems (IRIS) Lab, Arizona State University · Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  9. The Port-Hamiltonian Structure of Vehicle Manipulator Systems

    Feb 25, 2026Ramy RashadRoboticsPort-Hamiltonian Systems

    Control and Instrumentation Engineering department and Interdisciplinary Research Center for Smart Mobility and Logistics, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, 34464, Saudi Arabia

  10. Smoothly Differentiable and Efficiently Vectorizable Contact Manifold Generation

    Feb 23, 2026Onur Beker, Andreas René Geist, Anselm Paulus +4Robotics SimulationDifferentiable Physics

    University of Tübingen · Idiap Research Institute · EPFL

  11. CENIC: Convex Error-controlled Numerical Integration for Contact

    Nov 11, 2025Vince Kurtz, Alejandro CastroRobotics SimulationMultibody Dynamics

  12. Highly-Efficient Differentiable Simulation for Robotics

    Sep 11, 2024Quentin Le Lidec, Louis Montaut, Yann de Mont-Marin +3Robotics SimulationMultibody Dynamics

    Inria, Ecole normale sup´erieure CNRS, PSL Research University 75005 Paris, France