Prevent robot going through obstacle showing unstable behaviour

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We are using Gazebo and ODE Physics Engine to train a robot to avoid an obstacle. In case of collision, the robot shows the following undesired behaviour:

• Interpenetration between the robot and the obstacle is not corrected

• The robot becomes very unstable showing a jittering behaviour and the joints drift away from each other

We have explored the following options with no results so far:

1. Make simulation slower, decrease the realtime factor
2. Modify physics engine parameters and Gazebo link/joint parameters such as damping, friction, CFP, ERP
3. Increase no. iterations, change SOR
4. Set the minimum depth allowed before contact correction is applied to 0.0001

The unstable and non-realistic robot behaviour persists, what makes as wonder if this is due to the choice of the parameters or intrinsic to the collision computation method used by ODE.