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Torsional friction

This tutorial is about torsional friction. For translational friction, see this tutorial.

Overview

Note: Torsional friction currently works only with the ODE physics engine.

This tutorial will explain how torsional friction works and describe how to set it up from the GUI or SDF.

Why torsional friction

Behaviour without torsional friction

When a box is rotating on top of a plane, there's a large surface of contact between them. At each point of contact, translational friction acts to decelerate the box. You can try it by yourself:

  1. Open Gazebo with the default physics engine and insert a box

  2. Choose View -> Transparent and then View -> Contacts, so we can see the contact points.

  3. Right-click the box and choose Apply Force and Torque

  4. On the dialog, write 1000.0 Nm on the torque's Z axis, then press Apply Torque. The box will rotate a bit and then stop.

Now try the same with a sphere. You'll see that the sphere starts spinning and never stops. Why is that?

The different behaviours happen because Gazebo has translational friction enabled by default with default parameters, but torsional friction is disabled by default.

The box has a large surface with several points of contact with the ground, you can see them masked as blue spheres on the image above. Each contact point has both angular and linear velocity perpendicular to the contact normal. The presence of linear velocity triggers translational friction.

On the other hand, the sphere's single point of contact doesn't have a linear velocity, so translational friction doesn't act on it. If we want the sphere to stop due to friction, we will need to set up torsional friction for it.

Behaviour with torsional friction

Let's add another sphere to the world and set a few parameters to it which will enable torsional friction.

  1. Insert another sphere in the world

  2. Right-click the sphere and choose Edit model, you'll enter the model editor.

  3. Double click the sphere to open its inspector. Go to the Collision tab, then find Surface -> Friction. There are a few parameters there which are important for torsional friction, they will be explained below. For now, we want to set Use patch radius to false and input the sphere's radius into Surface radius, which is 0.5 m. Note that the torsional friction coefficient is 1.0 by default.

  4. Torsional friction is typically very low because of the small contact area. For our experiment, we want a lot of friction so the sphere stops fast. One way to achieve this is to make the sphere very heavy so it presses against the ground. So let's go on the Link tab and set the mass to 10000 Kg. The heavier it is, the more it presses against the ground and the higher the friction.

  5. Apply your changes, close the inspector and go to File -> Exit Model Editor. Make sure you save the new model.

    Tip: The simulation stays paused after returning from the Model Editor. Make sure that you click the play button before continuing.

  6. Back in the main window, apply torque to the new sphere as you did for the old one. Unlike the first sphere (which is still rotating, it will rotate forever), the new sphere quickly stops spinning when the torque is applied.

How it works

Torsional friction equation

Torsional friction torque is computed based on contact depth and surface radius as follows: (you can find more detailed calculations here)

T = 3*PI/16 * a * coefficient * N

Where:

  • 3 PI / 16: constant approximately equal to 0.589

  • T: Torque due to torsional friction.

  • N: Normal force at contact.

  • coefficient: Coefficient of torsional friction. This is usually the same as the translational friction coefficients mu and mu2.

  • a: Contact patch radius (patch_radius in SDF). This is the radius of the contact area between surfaces. A sphere on top of a plane generates a circular patch area which depends on the sphere radius and the contact depth as seen below.

The patch is calculated as:

a = sqrt(R * d)

Where:

  • R: Surface radius at contact point (surface_radius in SDF).

  • d: Contact depth.

SDF parameters

As seen in the equations above, unlike translational friction, torsional friction doesn't depend only on the normal force and the friction coefficient. It also depends on the area of contact between surfaces.

SDF offers two ways of parametrizing the contact surface. The user can either define a patch_radius (a above), which will be always the same independently of the contact depth or a surface_radius (R above), which is used together with contact depth. Note that in both cases, the user is specifying a single value for the whole surface, so picking values for non-spherical surfaces might require fine tuning.

To choose between methods, you can set the use_patch_radius tag to true for patch_radius and false to use surface_radius.

Default values

  • coefficient: Like mu and mu2, coefficient has a default value of 1.0.

  • use_patch_radius: True by default, so the patch_radius is used.

  • patch_radius: Zero by default, so even if coefficient is set, there will be no torsional friction.

  • surface_radius: Zero by default, so even if coefficient is set, there will be no torsional friction.

Example

Back to the example above, since we knew the sphere radius, we chose the surface_radius method by setting use_patch_radius to false. Then we set the correct radius as well.

Since torsional friction by definition is very little (think of how long a top keeps spinning), we increased the sphere mass to a huge value to make a lot of pressure and increase contact depth, thus increasing torsional friction.

On SDF, the torsional friction for the sphere example would look as follows:

<model ...>
 ...
  <link ...>
    <collision ...>
     ...
      <surface>
        <friction>
          <torsional>
            <coefficient>1.0</coefficient>
            <surface_radius>0.5</surface_radius>
            <use_patch_radius>false</use_patch_radius>
          </torsional>
        </friction>
       ...
      </surface>
    </collision>
  </link>
</model>

Example world

Gazebo comes with a demo world which you can run as follows:

gazebo -u worlds/torsional_friction_demo.world

On the demo there are various models rotating. Models with higher friction stop first.