A Jupyter Notebook Environment for Multibody Dynamics

DARTS is a rigid/flexible multibody dynamics toolkit for the modeling and simulation of aerospace and robotic vehicles for engineering applications. In this paper we describe an on-line, browser-based environment using Jupyter notebooks to support training needs for the DARTS software. The suite of curated tutorial notebooks is organized into different topic areas, and into multiple themes within each topic area. The notebooks within a theme use a progression of examples for users to expand their understanding of the software. The topic areas include one on the DARTS multibody dynamics software and another one on the theory underlying the multibody dynamics formulation. We also describe a number of Jupyter extensions that were used — and some developed in house — to enhance the notebook interface for use with the dynamics simulation software. One significant extension we implemented allows the embedding of live 3D visualizations within simulation notebooks.