Contacts and friction

The video shows a simulation of 100.000 spheres with contacts. This is a "granular system" with applications in many areas, ranging from pellets in the mining industry to corn silos in the food industry.

Collision detection

The broad phase collision detection module in AgX detects bodies in the proximity of other bodies. The near field collider module computes a set of contact points for the colliding bodies. The contact stabilization and friction model enables modeling of material restitution, elasticity, dry friction and viscosity. A choice of different solvers can be applied to compute the contact forces and frictional forces, and these forces are applied when stepping the system in time.

Geometric representation

AgX supports a variety of geometric representations, such as box, sphere, cylinder, capsule, convex, convex decomposition, trimesh,heightfield, line and plane. This also includes dynamic trimesh-trimesh contact generation, with novel reduction of the contact set.

Example video - Robot

Faithful simulation of contacts and friction forces is particularly important in robotics when simulating a grasping tool, as in the example below.