Title:  Robust Optimization-based Solvers and Smooth Reformulations for 3D Contact

Contact is ubiquitous and often unavoidable, and yet modeling contacting systems continues to stretch the limits of available computational tools. In part, this is due to the unique hurdles posed by contact problems. Several intricately intertwined physical and geometric factors make contact computations hard, especially in the presence of friction and nonlinear elasticity. In this talk, I will discuss our recent work on a new optimization-based finite element solver, which is constructed for mesh-based discretizations of nonlinear elastodynamic problems supporting large nonlinear deformations, implicit time-stepping with contact and friction. Built on top of a smooth barrier reformulation and a custom Newton-type optimization, it is a first-of-its-kind “plug-and-play” contact simulation framework that provides convergent and unconditionally feasible intersection-free trajectories. The method is greatly useful for applications in 3D animations, movie visual effects, and video games. The scheme also enables future studies of differentiable simulations of nonsmooth physics-constrained inverse problems in design, control, and robotics

Zoom:  https://zoom.us/j/96619702488?pwd=TWNIZGpFUnA5ZnltWDNMT3BOQ3MxQT09