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Python tool kit for multi-body dynamics.

Project description

https://travis-ci.org/pydy/pydy.png?branch=master

PyDy, short for Python Dynamics, is a tool kit written in and accessed through the Python programming language that utilizes an array of scientific tools to study multibody dynamics. The goal is to have a modular framework and eventually a physics abstraction layer which utilizes a variety of backend that can provide the user with their desired workflow, including:

  • Model specification

  • Equation of motion generation

  • Simulation

  • Visualization

  • Publication

We started by building the SymPy mechanics package which provides an API for building models and generating the symbolic equations of motion for complex multibody systems and have more recently developed two packages, pydy.codegen and pydy.viz, for simulation and visualization of the models. The remaining tools currently used in the PyDy workflow are popular scientific Python packages such as NumPy, SciPy, IPython, and matplotlib (i.e. the SciPy stack) which provide additional code for numerical analyses, simulation, and visualization.

Installation

The PyDy workflow has hard dependecies on these Python packages:

  • Python >= 2.7

  • setuptools

SciPy Stack

It’s best to install the SciPy Stack dependencies using the instructions provided on the SciPy website.

Once the dependencies are installed, the package can be installed from PyPi using:

$ easy_install pydy

or:

$ pip install pydy

For system wide installs you will need root permissions (perhaps prepend commands with sudo).

You can also grab the source and then install[1].

Using the zip download:

$ wget https://github.com/pydy/pydy/archive/master.zip
$ unzip pydy-master.zip
$ cd pydy-master
$ python setup.py install

Using Git:

$ git clone https://github.com/pydy/pydy.git
$ cd pydy
$ python setup.py install

Development Environment

Development Dependencies

Tests require nose:

  • nose: 1.3.0

Isolated Virtual Environment Installation

The following installation assumes you have virtualenvwrapper and all the dependencies needed to build the packages:

$ mkvirtualenv pydy-dev
(pydy-dev)$ pip install numpy scipy cython nose theano sympy
(pydy-dev)$ pip install matplotlib # make sure to do this after numpy
(pydy-dev)$ git clone git@github.com:pydy/pydy.git
(pydy-dev)$ cd pydy
(pydy-dev)$ python setup.py develop

Run the tests:

(pydy-dev)$ nosetests

For the Javascript tests the Jasmine and blanket.js libraries are used. Both of these libraries are included in pydy-viz with the source. To run the Javascript tests, go to the javascript library directory:

$ cd pydy/viz/static/js

Then run a simple HTTP Server with Python (the server is required due to some cross browser issues with blanket.js):

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Now visit http://localhost:8000/SpecRunner.html in a webgl compliant browser.

Run the benchmark to test the n-link pendulum problem.:

(pydy-dev)$ python bin/benchmark_pydy_code_gen.py <max # of links> <# of time steps>

Usage

Simply import the modules and functions when in a Python interpreter:

>>> from sympy import symbols
>>> from sympy.physics import mechanics
>>> from pydy import codegen, viz

Documentation

The documentation is hosted at http://pydy-viz.readthedocs.org but you can also build them from source using the following instructions:

Requires:

  • Sphinx

  • numpydoc

pip install sphinx numpydoc

To build the HTML docs:

$ sphinx-build -b html docs/src docs/build

View:

$ firefox docs/build/index.html

Code Generation

This package provides code generation facilities for PyDy. For now, it generates functions that can evaluate the right hand side of the ordinary differential equations generated with sympy.physics.mechanics with three different backends: SymPy’s lambdify, Theano, and Cython.

Optional Dependencies

To enable different code generation backends, you can install the various optional dependencies:

  • Cython: >=0.15.1

  • Theano: >=0.6.0

Usage

This is an example of a simple 1 degree of freedom system: a mass, spring, damper system under the influence of gravity and a force:

/ / / / / / / / /
-----------------
  |    |     |   | g
  \   | |    |   V
k /   --- c  |
  |    |     | x, v
 --------    V
 |  m   | -----
 --------
    | F
    V

Derive the system:

from sympy import symbols
import sympy.physics.mechanics as me

mass, stiffness, damping, gravity = symbols('m, k, c, g')

position, speed = me.dynamicsymbols('x v')
positiond = me.dynamicsymbols('x', 1)
force = me.dynamicsymbols('F')

ceiling = me.ReferenceFrame('N')

origin = me.Point('origin')
origin.set_vel(ceiling, 0)

center = origin.locatenew('center', position * ceiling.x)
center.set_vel(ceiling, speed * ceiling.x)

block = me.Particle('block', center, mass)

kinematic_equations = [speed - positiond]

force_magnitude = mass * gravity - stiffness * position - damping * speed + force
forces = [(center, force_magnitude * ceiling.x)]

particles = [block]

kane = me.KanesMethod(ceiling, q_ind=[position], u_ind=[speed],
                     kd_eqs=kinematic_equations)
kane.kanes_equations(forces, particles)

Store the expressions and symbols in sequences for the code generation:

mass_matrix = kane.mass_matrix_full
forcing_vector = kane.forcing_full
constants = (mass, stiffness, damping, gravity)
coordinates = (position,)
speeds = (speed,)
specified = (force,)

Now generate the function needed for numerical evaluation of the ODEs. The generator can use various back ends: lambdify, theano, or cython:

from pydy.codegen.code import generate_ode_function

evaluate_ode = generate_ode_function(mass_matrix, forcing_vector, constants,
                                     coordinates, speeds, specified,
                                     generator='lambdify')

Integrate the equations of motion under the influence of a specified sinusoidal force:

from numpy import array, linspace, sin
from scipy.integrate import odeint

x0 = array([0.1, -1.0])
args = {'constants': array([1.0, 1.0, 0.2, 9.8]),
        'specified': lambda x, t: sin(t)}
t = linspace(0.0, 10.0, 1000)

y = odeint(evaluate_ode, x0, t, args=(args,))

Plot the results:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.plot(t, y)
plt.legend((str(position), str(speed)))
plt.show()

Visualization (viz)

Visualization of multibody systems generated with PyDy.

Release Notes

0.2.1

  • Unbundled unecessary files from tar ball.

0.2.0

  • Merged pydy_viz, pydy_code_gen, and pydy_examples into the source tree.

  • Added a method to output “static” visualizations from a Scene object.

  • Dropped the matplotlib dependency and now only three.js colors are valid.

  • Added joint torques to the n_pendulum model.

  • Added basic examples for codegen and viz.

  • Graceful fail if theano or cython are not present.

  • Shapes can now use sympy symbols for geometric dimensions.

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