Implicit Contact Model for Discrete Elastic Rods in Knot Tying

Abstract

Rod–rod contact is critical in simulating knots and tangles. To simulate contact, typically a contact force is applied to enforce nonpenetration condition. This force is often applied explicitly (Euler forward). At every time-step in a dynamic simulation, the equations of motions are solved over and over again until the right amount of contact force successfully imposes the nonpenetration condition. There are two drawbacks: (1) Explicit implementation brings numerical convergence issues. (2) Solving equations of motion iteratively to find this right contact force slows down the simulation. In this article, we propose a simple, efficient, and fully implicit contact model with high convergence properties. This model is shown to be capable of taking large time-steps without forfeiting accuracy during knot tying simulations when compared to previous methods. We introduce a new contact potential, based on a smoothed segment–segment distance function, that is an analytic function of the four endpoints of the two contacting edges. Since this contact potential is differentiable, we can incorporate its force (negative gradient of the energy) and Jacobian (negative Hessian of the energy) into the elastic rod simulation.