Ball dynamics simulation on OpenHRP3

This paper describes an improvement on Open-HRP3, an integrated software platform for robot simulations and software developments, in order to achieve realistic simulations with the dynamics of a ball interacting with the environment and with a humanoid robot. Previously, the only way to simulate the dynamics of a ball was by using the model of a polyhedron consisting of many faces and vertices. As a consequence, the ball rolled erratically and bounced in a unnatural way. The improvement consists in treating this polyhedron as a sphere when it comes to detect its collision with the environment modeled by meshes. We have developed a different algorithm, so that the dynamics engine of OpenHRP3 can simulate realistically the ball´s dynamics, by using an original method capable of showing much more accurate results than the previous one used by this software platform, which used the model of a polyhedron.