A NEW APPROACH TO MOTOR CALCULUS AND RIGID BODY DYNAMICS WITH APPLICATION TO SERIAL OPEN-LOOP CHAINS (SCREW THEORY)

Motor calculus is a mathematical system that is quite analogous to vector calculus and is particularly well-suited for rigid body dynamics. This work presents a new approach to motor calculus and its application to dynamics. As opposed to the common bivector definition, a motor is here defined to be a special kind of vector field. It is demonstrated that this novel motor definition is both useful for investigating the mathematical structure of motor calculus and for applying motor calculus to rigid body dynamics. New results include simple derivations and representations of the inertia dyadic for a rigid body and of the equations of motion for a serially connected open-loop kinematic chain.