moorepants
commented
10 years ago Thanks Chris. Seems like trying the arm problem is a good start and have the pendulum as a fall back. The pendulum is the classic problem and would be familiar. We could do a double pendulum.
Simple muscles could be cool for the bio model. I'm going to try to get the arm working in the next day or so to see if that is feasible. I want to try to use the Ricatti equation solver in scipy to do a simple LQR optimal controller for it without having to use python-control because that is more of a pain to setup.
Kid on a swing is a nice problem too.
@PythonDynamics/owners
I'm not sure if this is the best place to discuss the project idea, but I wanted to share ideas somewhere.
I like the 2d 2dof arm idea, especially considering that @moorepants will be giving that biomechanics tutorial. It's extendable, and maybe for the tutorial, it'd be good to have it all set up so people can continue adding on to a base model. Also, @moorepants has a N-link inverted pendulum balancing notebook already. So they could start with the cursive, then naturally add more links and do that balancing, or then in the biomechanics session, you could add muscles maybe. You could add helical springs and dampers to the joints and then model a long chain (a kid on a swing). I guess there's only a little time, so maybe people would only have time for the cursive.
Anyway, the audience sounds like they might have broad interests, and so the 2d arm makes sense, because it allows so many different extensions.