Multi Rigid-Body Contact Dynamics With Regularized Friction

A novel mathematical formulation in terms of a linear complementarity problem is introduced for multibody contact problems. In this approach, contacts are characterized based on kinematic constraints while the friction forces are simultaneously regularized and incorporated into the formulation. The variables of the resulting linear complementarity problem are only the normal forces. The main advantage of this formulation is a significant dimension reduction in the resulting linear complementarity problem in comparison with its counterpart formulations in the literature. Moreover, the dimension can be even further reduced by removing the velocity variables from the formulation. The proposed formulation is examined for benchmark examples yielding promising results.