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ODE Main Features

ODE is good for simulating articulated rigid body structures.An articulated structure is created when rigid
bodies of various shapes are connected together with joints of various kinds.Examples are ground vehicles
(where the wheels are connected to the chassis),legged creatures(where the legs are connected to the body),
or stacks of objects.
ODE is designed to be used in interactive or real-time simulation.It is particularly good for simulating
moving objects in changeable virtual reality environments.This is because it is fast,robust and stable,and
the user has complete freedom to change the structure of the system even while the simulation is running.
ODE uses a highly stable integrator,so that the simulation errors should not grow out of control.The
physical meaning of this is that the simulated system should not”explode”for no reason(believe me,this
happens a lot with other simulators if you are not careful).ODE emphasizes speed and stability over physical
accuracy.
ODE has hard contacts.This means that a special non-penetration constraint is used whenever two
bodies collide.The alternative,used in many other simulators,is to use virtual springs to represent contacts.
This is difficult to do right and extremely error-prone.
ODE has a built-in collision detection system.However you can ignore it and do your own collision
detection if you want to.The current collision primitives are sphere,box,capped cylinder,plane,ray,and
triangular mesh-more collision objects will come later.ODE’s collision system provides fast identification
of potentially intersecting objects,through the concept of“spaces”.
Here are the features:

1. Rigid bodies with arbitrary mass distribution.
2. Joint types:ball-and-socket,hinge,slider(prismatic),hinge-2,fixed,angular motor,universal.
3. Collision primitives:sphere,box,capped cylinder,plane,ray,and triangular mesh.
4. Collision spaces:Quad tree,hash space,and simple.
5. Simulation method:The equations of motion are derived from a Lagrange multiplier velocity based
   model due to Trinkle/Stewart and Anitescu/Potra.
6. A first order integrator is being used.It’s fast,but not accurate enough for quantitative engineering
   yet.Higher order integrators will come later.
7. Choice of time stepping methods:either the standard“big matrix”method or the newer iterative
   QuickStep method can be used.
8. Contact and friction model:This is based on the Dantzig LCP solver described by Baraff,although
   ODE implements a faster approximation to the Coloumb friction model.
9. Has a native C interface(even though ODE is mostly written in C++).
10. Has a C++interface built on top of the C one.
11. Many unit tests,and more being written all the time.
12. Platform specific optimizations.