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

This research paper introduces Lodos, a new simulation framework designed to address the computational bottleneck of contact-rich interactions involving detailed meshes. Unlike existing massively parallelized rigid-body simulators that often rely on coarse geometric approximations (e.g., spheres, capsules), Lodos employs novel routines for broadphase and narrowphase collision detection specifically tailored for mesh-mesh collisions. Experimental validation indicates that while maintaining physical faithfulness comparable to established simulators, Lodos achieves approximately an order of magnitude higher throughput in detailed mesh-mesh collision scenarios. The source code is available at https://github.com/martius-lab/lodos.