Modeling and Analysis of Non-unique Behaviors in Multiple Frictional Impacts

Understand

Many fundamental challenges in robotics, based in manipulation or locomotion, require making and breaking contact with the environment.

• To represent the complexity of frictional contact events, impulsive impact models are especially popular, as they often lead to mathematically and computationally tractable approaches.
• However, when two or more impacts occur simultaneously, the precise sequencing of impact forces is generally unknown, leading to the potential for multiple possible outcomes.
• This simultaneity is far from pathological, and occurs in many common robotics applications.