Lie group methods for rigid body dynamics and time integration on manifolds Original Research Article

Recently there has been an increasing interest in time integrators for ordinary differential equations which use Lie group actions as a primitive in the design of the methods. These methods are usually phrased in an abstract sense for arbitrary Lie groups and actions. We show here how the methods look when applied to the rigid body equations in particular and indicate how the methods work in general. An important part of the Lie group methods involves the computation of a coordinate map and its derivative. Various options are available, and they vary in cost, accuracy and ability to approximately conserve invariants. We discuss how the computation of these maps can be optimized for the rigid body case, and we provide numerical experiments which give an idea of the performance of Lie group methods compared to other known integration schemes.