Hybrid Sensitivity Analysis of Inertial Parameters of Multibody Systems

Parametric studies have received significant attention in several areas such as mechanical design and sensitivity analysis for simulation and control of robotic devices. Design sensitivity analysis methods for dynamic systems have been investigated intensively. Such an analysis is usually performed based on the evaluation of the derivatives of kinematic and kinetic quantities, objective functions, or performance criteria with respect to the design parameters. In this context, both direct and adjoint differentiations have been exploited. The first author of this paper has developed previously a novel approach which belongs to a totally different category [7, 8]. This approach is based on the reformed equations of motion which are linearized in terms of the inertial parameters. Based on an eigenvalue analysis, directions of the parameter space along which maximum/minimum changes can be achieved on the dynamics of the system, are obtained. Here, in this paper, we develop a hybrid approach by combing this approach with methods based on differentiation. It takes directional derivatives of the objective function in directions which are found based on the novel approach. Indeed, in this way, we take the advantages of both direct differentiation and normalization approaches for sensitivity analysis.

Keywords:

Sensitivity analysis , Inertial parameters , Direct differentiation , Multibody systems