position based dynamics for contact modeling in robotics simulaitons

[vpuri3]

hi all, I'm new to robotics and was wondering if anybody has thoughts on Position Based Dynamics methods: https://matthias-research.github.io/pages/publications/smallsteps.pdf. They seem to be able to account for constraints in a seemingly straightforward way.

if there is interest, I'm willing to prototype these algorithms in RigidBodyDynamics.jl, or start a new project altogether. im really just trying to get started with robotics simulations for kicks. my background is in writing fluid dynamics solvers. thanks in advance for your guidance.

ref JuliaRobotics/RigidBodyDynamics.jl#627

[vpuri3]

as discussed with @baggepinnen , I'll do this implementation in a new repo.

[vpuri3]

@rdeits, Chris Rackauckas mentioned you might be knowledgeable on this topic. any thoughts on this method?

[ChrisRackauckas]

That has nothing to do with this repo, so I don't know why this paper is posted here. But it's quite obviously a silly paper: Jacobian reuse schemes are the standard way to improve the performance of implicit integrators and they aren't even mentioned here. Simple handwritten implicit Euler is routinely around 2-3 orders of magnitude slower then well optimized higher order integration techniques with proper reuse schemes. Why was their baseline something nobody would ever use? Any paper that doesn't use something like Sundials CVODES or ARKODE as the baseline and instead uses simple implementations of first order methods should be an immediate red flag.