Linearly implicit time integration methods in real-time applications: DAEs and stiff ODEs

The methods for the dynamical simulation of multi-body systems in real-time applications have to guarantee that the time integration of the equations of motion is always successfully completed within an a priori fixed sampling time interval, typically in the range of 1.0-10.0 ms. Model structure, model complexity and numerical solution methods have to be adapted to the needs of real-time simulation. Standard solvers for stiff and for constrained mechanical systems are implicit and cannot be used straightforwardly in real-time applications because of their iterative strategies to solve the nonlinear corrector equations and because of adaptive strategies for stepsize and order selection. As an alternative, we consider in the present paper noniterative fixed stepsize time integration methods for stiff ordinary differential equations (ODEs) resulting from tree-structured multi-body system models and for differential algebraic equations (DAEs) that result from multi-body system models with loop-closing constraints.