Bug Articulation Bodies appear to be broken with 0 damping?

Either I'm missing something obvious (which I find more likely), or articulation bodies are fundamentally broken.

Use case:
We are simulating robotics in space, so articulation bodies sound appealing, but they fail even the most elementary tests.

Specifically, suppose you have an object with a non-uniform (!(x==y==z)) tensor and try to apply torque on more than one axis. In that case, the simulation breaks apart as the object starts to accelerate endlessly. Damping can counter this, of course, but this is very iffy since we need high precision.

The easiest way to reproduce this is to create two cubes:
1. Immovable cube that acts as a root.
2. Add a child cube scaled on one axis (to modify the tensor) and has 0 damping.
+ Attach it at an angle with a spherical joint, so it starts swinging on more than one axis.

With 0 damping/friction, I'd expect the swinging to stabilize. Instead, it keeps accelerating until one of the values reach angular velocity limits (way more evident after increasing the limit in project settings):



We observed similar behaviour when adding a free-floating (no gravity, no damping) and briefly applying torque on two axes. Instead of just spinning in place, it keeps accelerating and eventually flies offscreen.

 

Is not good becuse presition is low. For performance
Esperiment with adding more presition for the RB. This will be less perfomant but more accurate.
Play with RB options

"Interpolation" allows you to smooth out the effect of running physics at a fixed frame rate.

In the joint
For example actually Collition is discret. What happened if you add other option?

Also too little or too much mass has destructive consecuences.

CONCLUTION
Play with "Collision Detection" and "Interpolate"

Link: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-Rigidbody.html

 

If it was just the joints, we could work around it, but the issue appears to be the articulation body itself.

Take a simple cube scaled to 1:1:5 (to get uneven tensors), disable gravity/damping, apply some velocity or torque on two axes and it starts accelerating:



Test script:

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2.  
3. public class ArticulationTest : MonoBehaviour {
4.     [SerializeField] private float angularVelocity;
5.     [SerializeField] private bool applyAsTorque;
6.  
7.     private ArticulationBody _body;
8.  
9.     private void Start() {
10.         _body = GetComponent<ArticulationBody>();
11.      
12.         // same behaviour with lower limit/values, just less obvious.
13.         _body.maxAngularVelocity = 20;
14.      
15.         if (applyAsTorque)
16.             _body.AddTorque(new Vector3(0, 150, 30));
17.         else
18.             _body.angularVelocity = new Vector3(0, 3, 3);
19.     }
20.  
21.     private void Update() => angularVelocity = _body.angularVelocity.magnitude;
22. }

 

Done.
(Attaching the repro project here too, just in case anyone else wants to poke around at some point.)

 

Damping also seems to be broken, I have a game object with has linear and angular damping. When starting the game the damping is basically non existent, if I change these values in the editor by let's say 0.01%, then they start affecting the game object behavior, as if there was no damping before this change.