I'm new to maple and am evaluating it as a means of deriving symbolic equations of motion for a system comprising two flexible bodies sliding relative to one another and rotating in 3d space using the Boltzmann Hamel equations. I have written up the approach but the maths is extremely tedious by hand so I wondered if maple could help. For a start how do I define a simple indexed 3 element vector and then create the skew matrix equivalent (tilde matrix) as a general function that I can load with any similar vector. If I can do that Im well on theway to writing the expression for the kinetic energy in quasi coordinates.
