Determining contact data for time stepping rigid body simulations with convex polyhedral geometries

Abstract

Dynamic simulation of multi-rigid bodies is a key tool in robotics and many other domains. Over the past two decades, such simulations have moved from modeling primarily contact-free motion to simulating contact-based interactions like locomotion and grasping. Contact data - points of contact, surface normals, and signed distance - have proven straightforward to compute for multi-bodies modeled using primitive shapes, but there has been no accepted procedure for determining such data for bodies with convex polyhedral bodies. This paper investigates techniques that can be used to determine such data and pays special attention to numerical issues. We describe a unit test and provide two verification benchmarks for assessing correctness.