Abstractions for Mechanical Systems

This paper proposes a method for discretizing the state space of mechanical systems. This is a first attempt in using reduction techniques for mechanical systems in the partitioning of the state space. The method relies on a combination of transversal and tangential manifolds for the conservative mechanical system. The tangential manifolds are generated using constants of motion, which can be derived from Noether's theorem. The transversal manifolds are subsequently generated on a reduced space, given by the Routhian, via action-angle coordinates. The method fully applies for integrable systems.

We focus on a particular aspect of abstraction - partitioning the state space, as existing methods can be applied on the discretized state space to obtain an automata-based model. The contribution of the paper is to show that well-known reduction methods can be used to generate abstract models, which can be used for formal verification.