Michael Sherman

Ray A. O. Sinurat, Yuyang Huang, Nanqinqin Li et al.

Storage experiments are vital to advancing storage research, but creating extensible and reproducible storage artifacts can be a challenging task. Our research has shown that only 1% of SSD simulator-based experiences are packaged and 0.5% of them can be easily reproduced. The lack of such artifacts without proper reproducibility can significantly impede the advancement of storage research. The biggest challenges in these types of experiments are ensuring that we have the correct environment to conduct them and creating extensible experiments that can be built upon in future research. To address this issue, we introduce StorRep, a thorough study that provides six extensible and reproducible storage experiment artifacts that serve as the foundation for further storage research, utilizing the Chameleon infrastructure. Our study offers experiment patterns and guidelines that can help researchers create transparent and dependable storage experiments. We have successfully integrated our methods in several experiments in multiple community and educational events over several years and produced publicly accessible artifacts that can be extended and fully reproduced without any restrictions.

Ryan Elandt, Evan Drumwright, Michael Sherman et al.

We introduce an approximate model for predicting the net contact wrench between nominally rigid objects for use in simulation, control, and state estimation. The model combines and generalizes two ideas: a bed of springs (an "elastic foundation") and hydrostatic pressure. In this model, continuous pressure fields are computed offline for the interior of each nominally rigid object. Unlike hydrostatics or elastic foundations, the pressure fields need not satisfy mechanical equilibrium conditions. When two objects nominally overlap, a contact surface is defined where the two pressure fields are equal. This static pressure is supplemented with a dissipative rate-dependent pressure and friction to determine tractions on the contact surface. The contact wrench between pairs of objects is an integral of traction contributions over this surface. The model evaluates much faster than elasticity-theory models, while showing the essential trends of force, moment, and stiffness increase with contact load. It yields continuous wrenches even for non-convex objects and coarse meshes. The method shows promise as sufficiently fast, accurate, and robust for design-in-simulation of robot controllers.