Lodos: A Lightweight Simulator Designed for Contact-Rich Interactions with Detailed Meshes

Abstract

In recent years, massively parallelized rigid-body simulation has played a central role in robotics research, enabling rapid progress in areas such as reinforcement learning, stochastic optimal control, and randomized smoothing-based trajectory optimization. Particularly in contact-rich settings, the scalability of such simulations in large part depends on well-optimized representations of collision geometry, often requiring a coarse approximation of the underlying surfaces using primitives such as spheres, capsules, cylinders, and boxes. Whenever the complexity of the surfaces or the precision demands of the application render such approximations insufficient, it is instead necessary to employ mesh-mesh collisions, which impose a significant reduction in throughput. This paper proposes a simulation framework designed from scratch to address this bottleneck, with novel routines for broadphase and narrowphase collision detection as well as the subsequent contact dynamics computation. As experimentally validated, the framework matches existing well-established simulators in terms of physical faithfulness, and can achieve approximately an order of magnitude higher throughput in the detailed mesh-mesh collision setting that it specializes in. The source code is available at https://github.com/martius-lab/lodos.