Introduction 

DynaFlexPro is a collection of Maple routines that will automatically generate the 

symbolic equations of motion for an inter-connected system of rigid bodies and 

flexible beams, given only a description of the system as input.  In other words,  

DynaFlexPro (DFP) is a symbolic package for multibody dynamics. 

By eliminating the tedious and error-prone task of deriving equations by hand, DFP 

allows a user to focus on the analysis and design of a given physical system.  To 

date, DynaFlexPro has been used to model robots (serial and parallel), road and 

rail vehicles, many different mechanisms and machines, and biomechanic systems. 

DynaFlexPro supports a library of modeling components, including rigid bodies, 

flexible beams, forces, torques, springs, dampers, and a variety of joints (revolute, 

spherical, universal, etc.).  Unlike other multibody computer programs, DynaFlexPro 

allows the user to  select the coordinates appearing in the final equations of motion. 

These symbolic equations can be visually examined, exchanged with colleagues, 

numerically integrated within Maple, or exported as optimized simulation code (C, 

Fortran, Matlab, etc) to another package. 

DynaFlexPro is a system that is constantly under development.  New features, 

such as electrical components and transducers for  modeling electrical networks 

and mechatronic systems, tire models for vehicle dynamics, and hydraulic models 

are currently being tested and  will be made available in the future. 

DynaFlexPro is the result of 15 years of research into graph-theoretic modeling of 

multibody and mechatronic systems; this research has been carried out by the Motion 

Research Group at the University of Waterloo, Canada.  We hope that you find DFP 

to be a useful tool for analysis and design, and we encourage you to send feedback 

and suggestions for further improving our package to support@motionpro.ca. 

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