Multibody dynamics has been and continues to be an active area of research with numerous applications such as robotics, spacecraft and vehicle dynamics, gait analysis, biomolecular and materials research.
There a number of packages developed in academia which possess similar capabilities. Some of the research packages are limited to specific applications using complex data structures. These packages have a fundamental pedagogical principle centred in a simple data structure and on standard integration algorithms. In order to study the dynamic of a particular multi-body system, the student starts from an template of a MATLAB script or a jupyter notebook.
ToyDim is a MATLAB library of examples and tools used to simulate the dynamic behavior of a rigid and flexible body system with arbitrary topology. The methodology used for dynamics follows (Parviz E. Nikravesh 1989), using an Augmented Lagrange Formulation and the direct integration method (DIM). To describe large relative rotations in deformable systems a finite element representation of each flexible component is used.
