Rapidly computable viscous friction and no-slip rigid contact models

This article presents computationally efficient algorithms for modeling two special cases of rigid contact— contact with only viscous friction and contact without slip—that have particularly useful applications in robotic locomotion and grasping. Modeling rigid contact with Coulomb friction generally exhibits O(n) expected time complexity in the number of contact points and 2 worst-case complexity. The special cases we consider exhibit O(m+mn) time complexity (m is the number of independent coordinates in the multi rigid body system) in the expected case and polynomial complexity in the worst case; thus, asymptotic complexity is no longer driven by number of contact points (which is conceivably limitless) but instead is more dependent on the number of bodies in the system (which is often fixed). These special cases also require considerably fewer constrained nonlinear optimization variables thus yielding substantial improvements in running time. Finally, these special cases also afford one other advantage: the nonlinear optimization problems are numerically easier to solve.