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Fundamental Limitations in Performance and Interpretability of Common Planar Rigid-Body Contact Models

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Robotics Research

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ((SPAR,volume 10))

Abstract

The ability to reason about and predict the outcome of contacts is paramount to the successful execution of many robot tasks. Analytical rigid-body contact models are used extensively in planning and control due to their computational efficiency and simplicity, yet despite their prevalence, little if any empirical comparison of these models has been made and it is unclear how well they approximate contact outcomes. In this paper, we first formulate a system identification approach for six commonly used contact models in the literature, and use the proposed method to find parameters for an experimental data-set of impacts. Next, we compare the models empirically, and establish a task specific upper bound on the performance of the models and the rigid-body contact model paradigm. We highlight the limitations of these models, salient failure modes, and the care that should be taken in parameter selection, which are ultimately difficult to give a physical interpretation.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mechanical Engineering Department, MIT, Cambridge, USA

    Nima Fazeli & Alberto Rodriguez

  2. Toyota Research Institute, Los Altos, CA, USA

    Samuel Zapolsky & Evan Drumwright

Authors
  1. Nima Fazeli
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  2. Samuel Zapolsky
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  3. Evan Drumwright
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  4. Alberto Rodriguez
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nima Fazeli .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Nancy M. Amato

  2. Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Greg Hager

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Shawna Thomas

  4. Department of Electrical Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Miguel Torres-Torriti

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Fazeli, N., Zapolsky, S., Drumwright, E., Rodriguez, A. (2020). Fundamental Limitations in Performance and Interpretability of Common Planar Rigid-Body Contact Models. In: Amato, N., Hager, G., Thomas, S., Torres-Torriti, M. (eds) Robotics Research. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28619-4_41

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