Contact points between rigid and soft bodies in PyBullet

[AlexanderFabisch]

I try to implement a simple prototype to grasp a soft body with a robotic hand. The results look quite promising so far. Great work by the way!

Now I want to determine the contact forces between the hand and the soft body. I noticed that pybullet.getContactPoints(...) only gives me contact points between rigid bodies. Is it "easily" possible to extent it to include soft bodies?

I looked already a bit into the implementation of the Python function here and its corresponding implementation in the shared memory interface here. I could invest some time to prepare a pull request, but I might need some hints to start.

[erwincoumans]

It is best to create a separate function (getContactPoints2) to avoid breaking existing code. Not sure if the softbody contacts and the forces are stored persistently. Have you looked into it?

[AlexanderFabisch]

My colleague @oscar-lima is currently working on it. We will hopefully be able to open a pull request soon.

[johbrust]

Hi, I took over from @oscar-lima and I opened a pull-request a few minutes ago. It is based on the contributions by pull-requests #3937 and #3949. I added the information on contact forces based on the impulses acting on the tetrahedral nodes.

[erwincoumans]

Nice, I'll check it out soon.