Simulating a Tracked Robot: Why We Deleted the Tracks and Added 12 Invisible Wheels
No physics engine has a native "track" primitive. We share how we modelled a tracked skid-steer robot in Isaac Sim — the failure of a 46-link articulated track, a 4-contact model that turned "perfectly" and was wrong precisely because of it, and the measured 12-contact distributed virtual-wheel model we use today.