Stability characterizations of rigid body contact problems with Coulomb friction

This paper formally introduces several stability characterizations of syste ms of rigid bodies initially at rest and in unilateral contact with dry fri ction. These characterizations, weak stability and strong stability (and th eir complements), arise naturally from the dynamic model of the system. for mulated as a complementarity problem. Using the tools of complementarity th eory, these characterizations are studied in detail to understand their pro perties and to develop techniques to identify the stability classifications of general systems subjected to known external loads. MSC (1991): 73K10, 7 3T05.