6.4. SYSTEM OF RIGID BODIES

It was shown in the preceding section that affixing the origin of the body coordinate system to the body center of mass leads to a significant simplification in the resulting dynamic equations. Therefore, without any loss of generality, we consider the case of a centroidal body reference where the origin of the body coordinate system is rigidly attached to the body center of mass. In this case, the mass matrix is diagonal and the vector of centrifugal forces is identically equal to zero. By using Eq. 51, the equations of motion of a multibody system consisting of n_b interconnected bodies are given by

Equation 6.53