Cloth simulation has wide applications in computer animation, garment design, and robot-assisted dressing. This work presents a differentiable cloth simulator whose additional gradient information facilitates cloth-related applications. Our differentiable simulator extends a state-of-the-art cloth simulator based on Projective Dynamics (PD) and with dry frictional contact. We draw inspiration from previous work to propose a fast and novel method for deriving gradients in PD-based cloth simulation with dry frictional contact. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of the usefulness of gradients in contact-rich cloth simulation. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our simulator in a number of downstream applications, including system identification, trajectory optimization for assisted dressing, closed-loop control, inverse design, and real-to-sim transfer. We observe a substantial speedup obtained from using our gradient information in solving most of these applications.
@article{arxiv.2106.05306,
title = {DiffCloth: Differentiable Cloth Simulation with Dry Frictional Contact},
author = {Yifei Li and Tao Du and Kui Wu and Jie Xu and Wojciech Matusik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.05306},
year = {2022}
}