ComFree-Sim: A GPU-Parallelized Analytical Contact Physics Engine for Scalable Contact-Rich Robotics Simulation and Control

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12185v2
• Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:49:49 GMT
• Title: ComFree-Sim: A GPU-Parallelized Analytical Contact Physics Engine for Scalable Contact-Rich Robotics Simulation and Control
• Abstract summary: We present a GPU-parallelized analytical contact physics engine built on complementarity-free contact modeling.<n>ComFree-Sim computes contact impulses in closed form via an impedance-style prediction--correction update in the dual cone of Coulomb friction.
• Score: 7.095015036485825
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Physics simulation for contact-rich robotics is often bottlenecked by contact resolution: mainstream engines enforce non-penetration and Coulomb friction via complementarity constraints or constrained optimization, requiring per-step iterative solves whose cost grows superlinearly with contact density. We present ComFree-Sim, a GPU-parallelized analytical contact physics engine built on complementarity-free contact modeling. ComFree-Sim computes contact impulses in closed form via an impedance-style prediction--correction update in the dual cone of Coulomb friction. Contact computation decouples across contact pairs and becomes separable across cone facets, mapping naturally to GPU kernels and yielding near-linear runtime scaling with the number of contacts. We further extend the formulation to a unified 6D contact model capturing tangential, torsional, and rolling friction, and introduce a practical dual-cone impedance heuristic. ComFree-Sim is implemented in Warp and exposed through a MuJoCo-compatible interface as a drop-in backend alternative to MuJoCo Warp (MJWarp). Experiments benchmark penetration, friction behaviors, stability, and simulation runtime scaling against MJWarp, demonstrating near-linear scaling and 2--3 times higher throughput in dense contact scenes with comparable physical fidelity. We deploy ComFree-Sim in real-time MPC for in-hand dexterous manipulation on a real-world multi-fingered LEAP hand and in dynamics-aware motion retargeting, demonstrating that low-latency simulation yields higher closed-loop success rates and enables practical high-frequency control in contact-rich tasks.

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