JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.
Determining Frictional Inconsistency for Rigid Bodies is NP-Complete

Author
Baraff, David
Abstract
The computational complexity of computing the forces between bodies in contact is presented. The bodies are restricted to be perfectly rigid bodies that contact at finitely many points. It has been known for some time that under the Coulomb model of friction, some configurations of bodies are inconsistent; that is, no contact forces satisfying the constraints of the Coulomb friction model exist for the configuration. The main result of this paper is a proof that determining if a configuration is inconsistent is an NP-complete problem. An immediate corollary of this proof is that computing the contact forces for a configuration of bodies is NP-hard. Computing contact forces remains NP-hard even if configurations are restricted to be consistent.
Date Issued
1990-04Publisher
Cornell University
Subject
computer science; technical report
Previously Published As
http://techreports.library.cornell.edu:8081/Dienst/UI/1.0/Display/cul.cs/TR90-1112
Type
technical report