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Soft slender structures are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems and can be observed at scales that range from the nanometric to the kilometric, from polymers to space tethers. We present a practical numerical approach to simulate…
Humans manipulate various kinds of fluids in their everyday life: creating latte art, scooping floating objects from water, rolling an ice cream cone, etc. Using robots to augment or replace human labors in these daily settings remain as a…
This paper addresses the challenge of geometric quality assurance in manufacturing, particularly when human assessment is required. It proposes using Blender, an open-source simulation tool, to create synthetic datasets for machine learning…
In various applications, such as virtual reality and gaming, simulating the deformation of soft tissues in the human body during interactions with external objects is essential. Traditionally, Finite Element Methods (FEM) have been employed…
Finite element simulations of frictional multi-body contact problems via conformal meshes can be challenging and computationally demanding. To render geometrical features, unstructured meshes must be used and this unavoidably increases the…
The human neuromuscular system consisting of skeletal muscles and neural circuits is a complex system that is not yet fully understood. Surface electromyography (EMG) can be used to study muscle behavior from the outside. Computer…
With the maturation of differentiable physics, its role in various downstream applications: such as model predictive control, robotic design optimization, and neural PDE solvers, has become increasingly important. However, the derivative…
We present a fast and feature-complete differentiable physics engine, Nimble (nimblephysics.org), that supports Lagrangian dynamics and hard contact constraints for articulated rigid body simulation. Our differentiable physics engine offers…
Differentiable simulation of soft bodies is a foundation for system identification, trajectory optimization, and Real2Sim transfer. Yet, existing methods such as the differentiable Projective Dynamics (DiffPD) struggle when faced with…
Differentiable physics has recently been shown as a powerful tool for solving soft-body manipulation tasks. However, the differentiable physics solver often gets stuck when the initial contact points of the end effectors are sub-optimal or…
We present a differentiable pipeline for simulating the motion of objects that represent their geometry as a continuous density field parameterized as a deep network. This includes Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), and other related models.…
Deformable object manipulation is a classical and challenging research area in robotics. Compared with rigid object manipulation, this problem is more complex due to the deformation properties including elastic, plastic, and elastoplastic…
Tactile perception is key to dexterous manipulation, yet simulating high-resolution elastomer deformation remains computationally prohibitive. Finite element methods (FEM) deliver high fidelity but demand costly remeshing, while Material…
An important field in robotics is the optimization of controllers. Currently, robots are often treated as a black box in this optimization process, which is the reason why derivative-free optimization methods such as evolutionary algorithms…
High-fidelity simulation has become essential to the design and control of soft robots, where large geometric deformations and complex contact interactions challenge conventional modeling tools. Recent advances in the field demand…
Soft robots have garnered significant attention due to their promising applications across various domains. A hallmark of these systems is their bilayer structure, where strain mismatch caused by differential expansion between layers…
This research explored a novel explicit total Lagrangian Fragile Points Method (FPM) for finite deformation of hyperelastic materials. In contrast to mesh-based methods, where mesh distortion may pose numerical challenges, meshless methods…
Soft robots are made of compliant materials and perform tasks that are challenging for rigid robots. However, their continuum nature makes it difficult to develop model-based control strategies. This work presents a robust model-based…
Most research on the simulation of deformation and failure of metals has been and continues to be performed using the finite element method. However, the issues of mesh entanglement under large deformation, considerable complexity in…
Soft robots have the potential to interact with sensitive environments and perform complex tasks effectively. However, motion plans and trajectories for soft manipulators are challenging to calculate due to their deformable nature and…