A Fully Implicit Method for Robust Frictional Contact Handling in Elastic Rods

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fully implicit penalty-based method for simulating frictional contact in elastic rods, improving robustness and efficiency in complex scenarios like biological flagella bundling.

Contribution

The paper presents the Implicit Contact Model (IMC), a novel fully implicit approach that enhances stability and convergence in frictional contact simulations of elastic rods.

Findings

IMC achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art methods.

IMC converges faster than existing algorithms.

Demonstrated effectiveness in simulating biological flagella bundling.

Abstract

Accurate frictional contact is critical in simulating the assembly of rod-like structures in the practical world, such as knots, hairs, flagella, and more. Due to their high geometric nonlinearity and elasticity, rod-on-rod contact remains a challenging problem tackled by researchers in both computational mechanics and computer graphics. Typically, frictional contact is regarded as constraints for the equations of motions of a system. Such constraints are often computed independently at every time step in a dynamic simulation, thus slowing down the simulation and possibly introducing numerical convergence issues. This paper proposes a fully implicit penalty-based frictional contact method, Implicit Contact Model (IMC), that efficiently and robustly captures accurate frictional contact responses. We showcase our algorithm's performance in achieving visually realistic results for the challenging and novel contact scenario of flagella bundling in fluid medium, a significant phenomenon in biology that motivates novel engineering applications in soft robotics. In addition to this, we offer a side-by-side comparison with Incremental Potential Contact (IPC), a state-of-the-art contact handling algorithm. We show that IMC possesses comparable performance to IPC while converging at a faster rate.