Rigid Body Contact: Collision Detection to Force Computation

The most difficult aspect of rigid-body simulation is contact modeling. Two major subproblems of contact modeling are detecting contacts and computing contact forces. Although typically studied in isolation, these problems are tightly intertwined in simulation. This paper describes a method for fitting the pieces together. It gives an overview of the V-Clip collision detection algorithm, which can rapidly and robustly locate pairs of closest features between polyhedral models. Using the results from multiple invocations of V-Clip, persistent, oneand two-dimensional contact regions can be modeled. The paper briefly describes several methods for computing contact forces that act between bodies. It also presents a new, easy to implement method, based on the singular value decomposition of the contact matrix. Workshop on Contact Analysis and Simulation, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 1998 This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright c ©Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc., 1998 201 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139