Stability characterizations of rigid body contact problems with coulomb friction

This paper formally introduces several stability characterizations of systems of rigid bodies initially at rest and in unilateral contact with dry friction. These characterizations, weak stability and strong stability (and their complements), arise naturally from the dynamic model of the system, formulated as a complementary problem. Using the tools of complementarity theory, these characterizations are studied in detail to understand their properties and to develop techniques to identify the stability classifications of general systems subjected to known external loads.