NASA-Tensegrity-Robotics-Toolkit / NTRTsim

The NASA Tensegrity Robotics Toolkit Simulator, a physics based simulator to research the design and control of tensegrity robots.
Apache License 2.0
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Setting total mass for compounded rigid bodies #187

Open apsabelhaus opened 8 years ago

apsabelhaus commented 8 years ago

At the moment, it is slightly unclear what the total mass of compounded bodies will end up being in the underlying Bullet Physics model.

For example, if we have 4 rods that overlap at a point, will the overlapping area have mass m or 4m? We believe it to be closer to 4m, but this requires more investigation.

This enhancement would be to allow the user to specify the total mass of a combined body, for example in a Config for a specific tgModel in their application, and have this automatically applied to the compounded structure somewhere within tgcreater or core.

This enhancement will necessarily include a way to specify other tgRigidBodies, like boxes and rods, with mass instead of density.