I am a master's student at the physics department of the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. I started to learn about Webots, which I intend to use for my master's thesis. I am at the very beginning, so I am still figuring out how different details of the program work.
I encountered an issue, which source I cannot find. In the simplest simulations, like a ball bouncing off the ground, or a pendulum, there seems to be energy loss. All the parameters responsible for damping and friction (in "contact properties" and "damping" node) are zero. The elasticity ("bounce" node) is set to 1, so 100% elasticity. Nevertheless, the systems lose energy. Can it be that this happens purely because the time is discrete? For example, when the ball hits the wall, its velocity after the bounce is equal to the one a time step before the bounce? So it wouldn't be the exact velocity that a real ball would have in the moment it reaches the wall, but a short moment before? Do my questions make any sense to You? I am new to the world of simulations in general, so I don't know if this is a common issue.