Kinematics And Dynamics of Multibody Systems With Imperfect Joints

This book is to serve as a text for engineering students at the senior or beginning graduate level in a second course in dynamics. It grew out of many years experience in teaching such a course to senior students in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. While temperamentally disinclined to engage in textbook writing, I nevertheless wrote the present volume for the usual reason-I was unable to find a satisfactory English-language text with the content covered in my inter­ mediate course in dynamics. Originally, I had intended to fit this text very closely to the content of my dynamics course for seniors. However, it soon became apparent that that course reflects too many of my personal idiosyncracies, and perhaps it also covers too little material to form a suitable basis for a general text. Moreover, as the manuscript grew, so did my interest in certain phases of the subject. As a result, this book contains more material than can be studied in one semester or quarter. My own course covers Chapters 1 to 5 (Chapters 1,2, and 3 lightly) and Chapters 8 to 20 (Chapter 17 lightly).

Organizational design plays a critical role in the development of larger and more complex multi-agent systems (MAS). As systems grow to include hundreds or thousands of agents, those in the field must move from an agent-centric view of coordination and control to an organization-centric one.

Distributed parameter systems encompass a broad range of engineering applications from stereo speakers to space structures. The dynamic behavior of these systems is usually governed by one or more partial differential equations, which may accurately represent the physical system but are often difficult to solve exactly. Research in the dynamics and control of distributed parameter structural systems has grown dramatically in recent years, owing in part to the increasing complexity of these systems.