Formulating Dynamic Multi-Rigid-Body Contact Problems with Friction as Solvable Linear Complementarity Problems

A linear complementarity formulation for dynamic multi-rigid-body contact problems with Coulomb friction is presented. The formulation, based on explicit Euler integration and polygonal approximation of the friction cone, is guaranteed to have a solution for any number of contacts and contact configuration. A model with the same property, based on the Poisson hypothesis, is formulated for impact problems with friction and nonzero restitution coefficients. An explicit Euler scheme based on these formulations is presented and is proved to have uniformly bounded velocities as the stepsize tends to zero for the Newton–Euler formulation in body co-ordinates.