Abstract:

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, one- and 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.