A Recursive Hybrid Time-Stepping Scheme for Intermittent Contact in Multi-Rigid-Body Dynamics

This paper describes a novel method for the modeling of intermittent contact in multi-rigid-body problems. We use a complementarity based time-stepping scheme in Featherstone’s Divide and Conquer framework to efficiently model the unilateral and bilateral constraints in the system. The time-stepping scheme relies on impulse-based equations and does not require explicit collision detection. A set of complementarity conditions is used to model the interpenetration constraint and a linearized friction cone is used to yield a linear complementarity problem. The Divide and Conquer framework ensures that the size of the resulting mixed linear complementarity problem is independent of the number of bilateral constraints in the system. This makes the proposed method especially efficient for systems where the number of bilateral constraints are much greater than the number of unilateral constraints. The method is demonstrated by applying it to a falling 3D double pendulum.