Real-Time Physically-Accurate Simulation of Robotic Snap Connection Process

Abstract

We propose a novel real-time physically-accurate simulation framework for the snap connection process. For this, we first notice the peculiarities of the process, namely, small/smooth deformation, stiff connector and segmented contact. We then design our simulation to fully exploit these peculiarities by adopting the following strategies: 1) the technique of passive midpoint integration (PMI [1]), which allows for stable simulation of arbitrarily light/stiff system by enforcing discrete-time passivity; 2) linear finite element method (FEM [2]) modeling, which is adequate to deal with the small snap connector deformation while providing much faster speed as compared to nonlinear FEM; 3) segmentation of the snap connector FEM model and solving of each segment individually with their coupling analytically eliminated, thereby, further speeding up the simulation; 4) balanced model reduction (BMR [3]) to further reduce the dimension of each segment purely analytically without any prior experiment or simulation; and 5) parallelized data-driven collision detection, which turns out to further significantly speed up our simulation. Experimentally-verified simulations are also performed to show the efficacy of our proposed simulation framework.