A new formulation for the dynamics of rigid bodies with unilateral interactions

A new approach is introduced for modelling multibody systems with unilateral interactions. We focus on the simulation of the forward dynamics problem. The dynamic and kinematic steps are solved with two different formulations. First, a four-point-mass model is used to represent the rigid body dynamics, avoiding the use of rotational coordinates. Therefore, the nonlinear inertial terms do not appear explicitly in the formulation. However, there are constant distance constraints between the point masses. The velocities of the point masses are obtained by solving the dynamics with this model. The angular velocity of the rigid body can be calculated from such velocities. Then, the kinematic problem is solved using the rigid body representation that fully embeds the constant distance constraints. Thus, the proposed approach can improve the accuracy of the dynamic problem with unilateral contact since the nonlinear inertial terms do not enter the formulation explicitly. The constraints appear explicitly in the dynamics representation, but they are linear there. In the position update, they are embedded exactly through the model change back to the angular velocity-based minimum coordinate formulation.