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Simulating navigating in soft soil or mud

I’m trying to simulate the behavior of a soft/muddy terrain. I made a world with just one big rectangular box and change the softcfm and softerp to make a soft mud box. I spawn an another test box on the top of the mud box and expect that the test box would sink in the soft terrain. I can see that the box sinks into the ground but it resurfaces after sometime. How can I simulate the penetration of one object into another?

I have the following setting for the mud box

<surface>
    <contact>
        <collide_without_contact>true</collide_without_contact>
        <collide_bitmask>0x1</collide_bitmask>
        <ode>
            <soft_cfm>0.8</soft_cfm>
            <soft_erp>0.1</soft_erp>
            <min_depth>0.15</min_depth>
            <max_vel>0</max_vel>
        </ode>
    </contact>
</surface>

And for the a test box

<surface>
    <contact>
        <collide_without_contact>1</collide_without_contact>
        <collide_without_contact_bitmask>1</collide_without_contact_bitmask>
        <collide_bitmask>1</collide_bitmask>
        <ode>
             <soft_cfm>0.3</soft_cfm>
             <soft_erp>0.2</soft_erp>
             <max_vel>0.0</max_vel>
             <min_depth>0.15</min_depth>
       </ode>
    </contact>
</surface>

My use case is to simulate movement of a wheeled robot in a muddy terrain. I expected that if I make the terrain soft by setting high softcfm and low softerp and set properly the mindepth and maxvel then a part of the wheels would remain sunken in the terrain. And then I can navigate in this sunken state with some torsional friction.

Asked by ganeshari on 2023-04-27 08:47:07 UTC

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