Controlling the deformation of flexible objects is challenging due to their non-linear dynamics and high-dimensional configuration space. This work presents a differentiable Material Point Method (MPM) simulator targeted at control applications. We exploit the differentiability of the simulator to optimize a control trajectory in an active damping problem for a hyperelastic rope. The simulator effectively minimizes the kinetic energy of the rope around 2× faster than a baseline MPPI method and to a 20% lower energy level, while using about 3% of the computation time.
@article{arxiv.2512.13214,
title = {Differentiable Material Point Method for the Control of Deformable Objects},
author = {Diego Bolliger and Gabriele Fadini and Markus Bambach and Alisa Rupenyan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.13214},
year = {2025}
}