Simulating discontinuous phenomena affecting robot motion

The paper deals with simulation of mechanical systems affected by discontinuous phenomena. These phenomena involve impulsive events and/or models whose structure changes depending on the values of some system variables. The models of three kinds of these discontinuities (joint with static friction, collisions with rigid environment, bifurcation behavior near kinematic singularities) are given, and a simulation environment, based on the DAE solver DASSL is presented, that also allows efficient simulation of sample-data systems. Some simulation results achieved with the proposed environment are finally presented.