[ODE] Calculating G force

[Deak Szabolcs]

Well, I'm not that  much of an authority here, but I might add a few 
thoughts.
1, I presume you are aware that you won't get the actual so-called 
"G-Forces" with this calculation because those are relative to the the 
gravitational acceleration constant, so you should devide your results 
with g.
2, There is an actual real nasty problem with the code presented here 
and it actually took me quite a long time to notice it :)

What you do is you take the *body-relative* velocity vectors at each 
timestep and subtract them to find the velocity difference and thus the 
acceleration. While the method of dividing the velocity difference with 
time to get (average) acceleration is OK, doing that with body-relative 
velocities isn't!
Let me explain with two obvious examples:
a, you have a body moving on a circlular path with a constant speed, 
always heading (pointing) towards the tangent of the circle. At every 
instance in time the velocity of the object in the body-relative frame 
will always point straight ahead, so differences would always lead to 
zero acceleration even though there certainly is an acceleration keeping 
the object on a circular path.
b, even more obviously if you have an object moving at a constant speed 
(thus no G-forces) and spin the object around then the relative velocity 
vectors sampled at different times might be pointing anywhere falsely 
reporting acceleration.

The fix is simple, make the subtraction in the world frame and then 
convert the difference to body-relative coordinates!
This would also have a small error as the difference vector would not be 
perfectly perpendicular to the object in example a, but you would like 
the results much better I guess :)

(I won't go into the case of the acceleration felt by a point on an 
object offset from its center of gravity, but from what I see that was 
not your intention anyway)

Anders Olofsson wrote:

>Well, it didn't work that good.. Am I thinking this all wrong?.
>
>dVector3 vel,oldvel,force;
>void CalculateGForces (dBodyID body)
>{
>         const dReal *tmp;
>         dVector3 tmpv;
>
>         tmp=dBodyGetLinearVel (body);
>         dBodyVectorFromWorld (body, tmp[0], tmp[1], tmp[2], tmpv);
>         vel[0]=tmpv[0];
>         vel[1]=tmpv[1];
>         vel[2]=tmpv[2];
>         if (dtime>0){
>                 force[0]=(vel[0]-oldvel[0])/dtime;
>                 force[1]=(vel[1]-oldvel[1])/dtime;
>                 force[2]=(vel[2]-oldvel[2])/dtime;
>         }
>         oldvel[0]=vel[0];
>         oldvel[1]=vel[1];
>         oldvel[2]=vel[2];
>}
>
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