Validation toolbox for a Physics Engine

Abstract: Physics engines become more and more common due to the rapid development and increasing demand of simulations. With this comes a need of testing the engine, a way to measure its performance, not only its speed but also its accuracy and stability. The purpose of this thesis has been to create a set of benchmark tests. They aim to check the physical aspects, especially mechanics, of the engine. A strategy and export functions for the test results in order to automate the testing have also been developed. The resulting tests became a beam on piles which analyses constraint stability, an overdetermined system consisting of a static door on multiple hinges, a falling object investigating the accuracy of the integrator, a box on an inclined plane for testing the friction model, a single pendulum as well as a multibody pendulum checking constraint accuracy and energy conservation, the Earth orbiting around the Sun which tests the stability of the integrator and finally a cantilever beam that is a static test of a real scenario. After the tests are performed the results are presented on an HTML-page. A prototype of a Web application is also established as well as a set of scalar tests that can be performed continuously, in order to follow trends or compare the engine's performance from time to time. This thesis was initialized by Algoryx Simulation AB which also provided the engine, AgX Dynamics, with the numerical method called SPOOK. It mainly performed well on all tests. In order to build a fully general toolbox more tests need to be added such as material interactions, scalable test with thousands of bodies, torque tests as well as more complex scenarios, for example a scissor lift and robots. The work can also be extended with more developed export functions, both to the Web and to documents. Hopefully this thesis can be seen as a complement to the earlier efforts done in creating a general set of benchmarks and automation framework for continuous integration and testing.