Cited by 243Dynamics and Control of Mechanical SystemsRobotic Locomotion and ControlContact Mechanics and Variational Inequalities

Per-Contact Iteration Method for Solving Contact Dynamics

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Hwangbo, Jemin, Lee, Joonho, Hutter, Marco·2018·IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Abstract

This letter introduces a new iterative method for contact dynamics problems. The proposed method is based on an efficient bisection method which iterates over each contact. We compared our approach to two existing ones for the same model and found that it is about twice as fast as the existing ones. We also introduce four different robotic simulation experiments and compare the proposed method to the most common contact solver, the projected Gauss-Seidel (PGS) method. We show that, while both methods are very efficient in solving simple problems, the proposed method significantly outperforms the PGS method in more complicated contact scenarios. Simulating one time step of an 18-DOF quadruped robot with multiple contacts took less than 20 μs with a single core of a CPU. This is at least an order of magnitude faster than many other simulators which employ multiple relaxation methods to the major dynamic principles in order to boost their computational speed. The proposed simulation method is also stable at 50 Hz due to its strict adherence to the dynamical principles. Although the accuracy might be compromised at such a low update rate, this means that we can simulate an 18-DOF robot more than thousand times faster than the real time.

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Crossref · 10.1109/lra.2018.2792536

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18 of 18 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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  • Present-day technology is severely limited in its ability to simulate compliant contact, slippage, and deformable and crumbling terrain; phenomena such as mud, snow, thick vegetation, and gushing water are beyond the capabilities of robotics simulation frameworks.

    “Present-day technology is severely limited in its ability to simulate compliant contact, slippage, and deformable and crumbling terrain. As a result, phenomena such as mud, snow, thick vegetation, gushing water, and many others are beyond the capabilities of robotics simulation frameworks [30-32].”

    From Learning quadrupedal locomotion over challenging terrain (2020) · cites this paper as [30]

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Authors
Hwangbo, J., Lee, J., & Hutter, M.
Affiliations
ETH Zurich (CH)
Venue
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Published
2018-04
Volume
3
Issue
2
Pages
895-902
ISSN
  • 2377-3766 (ISSN-L)
  • 2377-3774
OpenAlex
W2779458783
Cited by
243
References
19
Citations by year
2026: 20 · 2025: 43 · 2024: 41 · 2023: 42 · 2022: 49 · 2021: 33 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 1
FWCI
7.43
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (publishedVersion)
  • Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • ETH Zürich Research Collection
Funders
  • Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
  • National Centre of Competence in Research Robotics and Project (200021-166232)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Control and Systems Engineering › Dynamics and Control of Mechanical Systems
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › Robotic Locomotion and Control
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computational Theory and Mathematics › Contact Mechanics and Variational Inequalities
Keywords
contact dynamics, bisection method, computational efficiency

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