Game Developers

Articulated Body Simulation
The articulated body simulation algorithm computes the
physics of a single body made up of several individ-
ual links. The articulated body simulation provided by
breve was implemented specically for the simulation
of biologically inspired articulated bodies such as insects,
animals or simple robots.
The articulated body simulation implemented in
breve is the O(n) algorithm presented by Featherstone
(1983) and described in detail by Mirtich (1996). The
algorithm takes as input the state of an articulated body
and the forces acting upon it, and gives as output the
resulting acceleration of the body and its component
joints. Integrating these values yields the velocities and,
in turn, the positions of the simulated bodies at each
time step

A spatial vector is six dimensional and
replaces two ordinary vectors in R

The spatial acceleration of a rigid body describes both
its linear and angular accelerations The spatial force applied to a rigid body describes both
the applied ordinary
D force and the applied
D moment