%0 Conference Paper %B Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation %D 2001 %T Randomized parallel simulation of constrained multibody systems for VR/haptic applications %A A. Bicchi %A L. Pallottino %A M. Bray %A P. Perdomi %K Dynamics and Simulation for Virtual Reality %K Haptics %X

In this paper, we consider the problem of efficiently simulating large interconnected mechanical systems. For applications such as haptic rendering of large, complex virtual environments, dynamic simulation software and hardware is still too slow to afford accurate performance in real-time. In particular, mechanisms with closed kinematic chains necessitate solutions to a set of differential equation with algebraic constraints (DAE's), that are often too heavy and stiff to be computed in real-time by present-day single-processor machines. On the other hand, the structure of most state-of-the-art algorithms does not easily lend itself to parallelization. In this paper, we propose and experimentally verify a technique for DAE simulation that profitably uses a degree of randomization to achieve efficient parallelization.

%B Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation %V 3 %P 2319-2324 %G eng