A matrix-free cone complementarity approach for solving large-scale, nonsmooth, rigid body dynamics

This paper proposes an iterative method that can simulate mechanical systems featuring a large number of contacts and joints between rigid bodies. The numerical method behaves as a contractive mapping that converges to the solution of a cone complementarity problem by means of iterated fixed-point steps with separable projections onto convex manifolds. Since computational speed and robustness are important issues when dealing with a large number of frictional contacts, we have performed special algorithmic optimizations in order to translate the numerical scheme into a matrix-free algorithm with O(n) space complexity and easy implementation. A modified version, that can run on parallel computers is discussed. A multithreaded version of the method has been used to simulate systems with more than a million contacts with friction. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.