Lodos simulates detailed mesh contacts for robots about ten times faster

Onur Beker, Andreas René Geist and Georg Martius have described Lodos in an arXiv paper, a simulator built from scratch for robot tasks with a lot of contact between detailed 3D shapes. Large parallel simulations usually approximate surfaces with simple shapes such as spheres, capsules and boxes to stay fast, and switching to full mesh-to-mesh collisions slows them down sharply.

Lodos uses new routines for finding collisions and computing the resulting contact forces. In the authors' tests it matched well-established simulators in physical accuracy and ran about ten times faster for detailed mesh-to-mesh collisions. The source code is publicly available.