No Free Slide: Spurious Contact Forces in Incremental Potential Contact

Abstract

Modeling contact between deformable solids is a fundamental problem in computer animation, mechanical design, and robotics. Existing methods based on $C^0$-discretizations -- piece-wise linear or polynomial surfaces -- suffer from discontinuities and irregularities in tangential contact forces, which can significantly affect simulation outcomes and even prevent convergence. To overcome this limitation, we employ smooth surface representations for both contacting bodies. Through a series of test cases, we show that our approach offers advantages over existing methods in terms of accuracy and robustness for both forward and inverse problems. The contributions of our work include identifying the limitations of existing methods, examining the advantages of smooth surface representation, and proposing forward and inverse problems to analyze contact force irregularities.