Robot falling apart on unsmooth terrain
I have a multi-link robot SDF in Gazebo 2.1. It is a simple "static" model with just inertia and collision elements defined, no transmission elements or motors specified.
When I let the robot fall down on a plane, everything is ok.
However, I need to use a terrain model obtained from point cloud triangulation. Such terrain contains lots of small triangles with varying normals and errors (because of precision of the measurements and triangulation). When I let the robot fall on this terrain, it instantly begins to fall apart (even if the terrain is quite planar/the normals do not differ much).
My workaround so far is to preprocess the SDF to remove all joints (in different words - the links remain, just the joints are static), so that for every joint config I have a different SDF model. Highly ineffective, I know. Luckily, by this modification, the model stops falling apart and behaves in an expected way.
Do you have an idea on how to have a model with non-static joints that doesn't fall apart?
How are you defining the model to be static? A model that has been defined as static will not fall. Could you post your model's SDF file?