Anakin

Anakin (Aerospace eNgineer's Assistant for Kinematics, Inertia and dyNamics) is a Matlab framework that defines a number of classes to facilitate modeling and solving Classical Mechanics problems in Aerospace Engineering and other disciplines.

Installation

Installation requires simply that you download Anakin and add the base directory to your Matlab path.

Dependencies

A recent version of Matlab is needed to run the code (R2016a or newer). The Symbolic Math Toolbox is required to use most of the functionality. Version R2018a or newer is recommended as it includes support for the example live scripts.

Work is underway to port Anakin to Octave. If you would like to contribute on this line of work, please contact us.

Quick usage guide

Anakin documentation can be found in the /docs subdirectory. A live script describes each Anakin's class, illustrating its usage and capabilities. The /problems subdirectory includes live scripts that solve the problems of the course 'Mechanics Applied to Aerospace Engineering' of the BSc program in Aerospace Engineering at UC3M.

To use Anakin, it is recommended that you first import the whole Anakin package with

import anakin.*

If you do not, then you will need to access all classes with the anakin. prefix, e.g. anakin.basis.

Currently Anakin defines the following classes:

tensor: genral class for scalars, vectors, and tensors
basis: vector bases
frame: reference frames
point: geometric points
particle: point particles
body: rigid bodies

The description of the properties and methods of each class is included in the header comments of each code file. For more information and example usages, see the live scripts in the /docs directory.

Testing

Unit tests are found in the /test subdirectory. After adding the Anakin package to your Matlab path, you can run all tests by executing runtests from this subdirectory.

Contributing

If you have any comments for improvement or are interested in contributing to the continued development of this or any of my other codes, please contact us.

Acknowledging

This program is the result of substantial effort at the Aerospace Engineering department of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. It is released as open source in the hope that it will be useful to other people. If you find it useful and/or use it in any of your works, we kindly ask you to acknowledge it by citing it:

Mario Merino (2018). https://github.com/uc3m-aerospace/anakin: First release DOI:10.5281/zenodo.2533336

uc3m-aerospace/anakin