Brian Mirtich,
``Impulse-based Dynamic Simulation of Rigid Body Systems,''
Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, December, 1996.
Impulse-based simulation is a new paradigm for the simulation of physical
systems, especially those which are hard to simulate efficiently
with traditional constraint-based methods.
The key idea is that all contact interactions
between objects are affected through collisions; even a block apparently
at rest on a table actually experiences many tiny, rapid collisions with
the surface.
The basic theory has been put into practice with Impulse, a
rigid body dynamic simulator running on HP and SGI platforms.
Impulse was written in C by
Brian Mirtich. Physical accuracy
and computational efficiency have been and continue to be important
design criteria for this evolving system. Physically accurate, real time
3D simulation of reasonably complex systems is the goal.
Ongoing Research with Impulse
Francesca Barrientos:
Metaphors for manual (haptic interface) interaction with virtual
environments and animated agents
Dina Berkowitz:
Simulation scripting languages and simulation-based design of parts feeders
John Canny:
Advising
Brian Mirtich:
Combining impulse- and constraint-based techniques for interactive
simulation
Eric Paulos,
Dinesh Manocha:
Parallelization of impulse-based algorithms
Check out Eric's work on
parallelizing Impulse, including an in-depth
tour
through its operational steps.
Aaron Wallack:
Simulation-based verification of fixturing algorithms
Papers
Brian Mirtich,
``Impulse-based Dynamic Simulation of Rigid Body Systems,''
Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, December, 1996.
Brian Mirtich,
``Hybrid Simulation: Combining Constraints and Impulses,''
in Proceedings of First Workshop on Simulation and Interaction
in Virtual Environments,
July 1995.
[238K postscript]
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Brian Mirtich and John Canny,
``Impulse-based Simulation of Rigid Bodies,''
in Proceedings of 1995 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics,
April 1995.
[3.46M postscript]
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Brian Mirtich and John Canny,
``Impulse-based Dynamic Simulation,''
in Proceedings of Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics,
February 1994.
[2.54M postscript]
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Simulation Art Gallery
Special thanks to Master Motion Blurer,
Paul Debevec .
Brian Mirtich /
mirtich@cs.berkeley.edu /
3 Jan 1997
Bowling pins