Contact coupling between deformable and rigid bodies often induces situations where the surfaces of both types of bodies collide over a large area. This situation introduces serious difficulties in LCP-type contact solvers, because a large amount of contact constraints are inertially coupled through the rigid body. In this paper, we present an algorithm for efficiently simulating contact between rigid and deformable bodies. The solution to the LCP involves two steps: building the system matrix, which tends to be large and dense due to the coupling between the rigid and deformable bodies in contact, and solving the resulting problem. We efficiently handle both steps by reformulating the large LCP and separating constraint sets acting on rigid bodies alone, on deformable bodies alone, and on both rigid and deformable bodies. A modified projected Gauss-Seidel solver handles the partitioned sets of constraints in an efficient manner. We demonstrate our algorithm on several complex and contact-intensive scenarios, such as those involving cloth simulations, or contact between bone and soft-tissue.

@InProceedings\{MO11,
  author       = "Miguel, Eder and Otaduy, Miguel A.",
  title        = "Efficient Simulation of Contact between Rigid and Deformable Objects",
  booktitle    = "ECCOMAS - Multibody Dynamics",
  year         = "2011",
  url          = "http://gmrv.es/Publications/2011/MO11"
}