A complementarity approach to a quasistatic multi-rigid-body contact problem

In this paper, we study the problem of predicting the quasistatic planar motion of a passive rigid body in frictional contact with a set of active rigid bodies. The active bodies can be thought of as the links of a mechanism or robot manipulator whose positions can be actively controlled by actuators. The passive body can be viewed as a ‘grasped’ object, which moves only in response to contact forces and other external forces such as those due to gravity. We formulate this problem as a certain uncoupled complementarity problem, and show that it belongs to the class of NP-complete problems. Finally, numerical results of our proposed linear programming-based solution algorithm for this class of problems are presented and compared with the only other currently available solution algorithm.