A decomposition of the manipulator inertia matrix

A decomposition of the manipulator inertia matrix is essential, for example, in forward dynamics, where the joint accelerations are solved from the dynamical equations of motion. To do this, unlike a numerical algorithm, an analytical approach is suggested in this paper. The approach is based on the symbolic Gaussian elimination of the inertia matrix that reveal recursive relations among the elements of the resulting matrices. As a result, the decomposition can be done with the complexity of order n, O(n), where n being the degrees of freedom of the manipulator, as opposed to an O(n³) scheme, required in the numerical approach. In turn, O(n) inverse and forward dynamics algorithms can be developed. As an illustration, an O(n) forward dynamics algorithm is presented