No Free Slide: Spurious Contact Forces in Incremental Potential Contact

TL;DR

This paper introduces a smooth surface representation approach for modeling contact between deformable solids, improving accuracy and robustness over traditional methods that suffer from discontinuities and irregular contact forces.

Contribution

It identifies limitations of existing $C^0$-discretization methods and proposes a smooth surface approach with forward and inverse problems to analyze contact force irregularities.

Findings

Enhanced accuracy in contact force modeling

Increased robustness in simulation outcomes

Better convergence properties

Abstract

Modeling contact between deformable solids is a fundamental problem in computer animation, mechanical design, and robotics. Existing methods based on $C^0$-discretizations -- piece-wise linear or polynomial surfaces -- suffer from discontinuities and irregularities in tangential contact forces, which can significantly affect simulation outcomes and even prevent convergence. To overcome this limitation, we employ smooth surface representations for both contacting bodies. Through a series of test cases, we show that our approach offers advantages over existing methods in terms of accuracy and robustness for both forward and inverse problems. The contributions of our work include identifying the limitations of existing methods, examining the advantages of smooth surface representation, and proposing forward and inverse problems to analyze contact force irregularities.