Multibody dynamics are used in interactive and real-time applications, ranging from computer games to virtual prototyping, and engineering. All these areas strive towards faster and larger scale simulations. Particularly challenging are large-scale simulations with highly organized and structured stacking. We present a stable, robust, and versatile method for multibody dynamics simulation. Novel contributions include a […]

This paper describes an impulse-based dynamic simulation method for articulated bodies which has a linear time complexity. Existing linear-time methods are either based on a reduced-coordinate formulation or on Lagrange multipliers. The impulse-based simulation has advantages over these well-known methods. Unlike reduced-coordinate methods, it handles nonholonomic constraints like velocity-dependent ones and is very easy to […]

Animation techniques for controlling passive simulation are commonly based on an optimization paradigm: the user provides goals a priori, and sophisticated numerical methods minimize a cost function that represents these goals. Unfortunately, for multibody systems with discontinuous contact events these optimization problems can be highly nontrivial to solve, and many-hour offline optimizations, unintuitive parameters, and […]

“We present a fast continuous collision detection (CCD) algorithm for articulated models using Taylor models and temporal culling. Our algorithm is a generalization of conservative advancement (CA) from convex models [Mirtich 1996] to articulated models with non-convex links. Given the initial and final configurations of a moving articulated model, our algorithm creates a continuous motion […]