Symbolic factorization of inertia matrix for space robot simulation

In the simulation of a space robot, factorization of its inertia matrix is necessary to solve for the joint accelerations. Usually this factorization is done numerically. For that, the computational complexity is cubic in the degrees of freedom (DOF) of the system at hand. In this paper, a symbolic factorization of the inertia matrix is presented. This allows one to calculate the joint accelerations with the complexity that is linear in the DOF. The approach is originally introduced for the simulation of fixed-base industrial manipulators. Here, the method is extended to serial type space robots.