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Port wheel plowing model from gz-sim #2328

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scpeters opened this issue Mar 5, 2024 · 1 comment
Open

Port wheel plowing model from gz-sim #2328

scpeters opened this issue Mar 5, 2024 · 1 comment
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enhancement New feature or request

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@scpeters
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scpeters commented Mar 5, 2024

Desired behavior

As there are many applications of wheeled robots driving on deformable terrain / soft soil, there is a use case for simulating the behavior of wheels in deformable terrain. This is challenging for physics engines that use rigid shapes for collision detection and contact resolution. A model of the plowing effect of wheels moving in deformable terrain was proposed based on changing the contact point position and normal direction based on the wheel's velocity (see gazebosim/gazebo-classic#3085) and implemented for the gazebo-classic fork of ODE in gazebosim/gazebo-classic#3164. An extension providing a nonlinear plowing effect was proposed in gazebosim/gazebo-classic#3342, though it was not merged since ABI compatibility would have been broken.

This issue will be complete when this functionality has been ported to gz-sim with required changes in gz-sim, gz-physics, and a physics engine supported by gz-physics (likely dartsim, see also gazebosim/gazebo-classic#3163).

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Implementation suggestion

The existing implementation in gazebo-classic's fork of ODE is implemented in a contact callback function. A similar mechanism should be found for a physics engine supported by gz-physics to modify contact points and normals after narrow-phase collision detection but before contact constraints are created. Once this functionality has been added to a supported physics engine, the feature should be exposed in gz-physics and gz-sim.

Additional context

@scpeters scpeters added the enhancement New feature or request label Mar 5, 2024
@azeey
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azeey commented Mar 11, 2024

A mechanism for customizing contact point properties was added in gazebosim/gz-physics#267. Hopefully it's sufficient, but if not it should be a good starting point.

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