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Many fundamental challenges in robotics, based in manipulation or locomotion, require making and breaking contact with the environment. To represent the complexity of frictional contact events, impulsive impact models are especially…
A key ingredient to achieving intelligent behavior is physical understanding that equips robots with the ability to reason about the effects of their actions in a dynamic environment. Several methods have been proposed to learn dynamics…
Accurate post-impact velocity predictions are essential in developing impact-aware manipulation strategies for robots, where contacts are intentionally established at non-zero speed mimicking human manipulation abilities in dynamic grasping…
An effective paradigm for simulating the dynamics of robots that locomote and manipulate is multi-rigid body simulation with rigid contact. This paradigm provides reasonable tradeoffs between accuracy, running time, and simplicity of…
This technical report provides an in-depth evaluation of both established and state-of-the-art methods for simulating constrained rigid multi-body systems with hard-contact dynamics, using formulations of Nonlinear Complementarity Problems…
Rigid bodies, plastic impact, persistent contact, Coulomb friction, and massless limbs are ubiquitous simplifications introduced to reduce the complexity of mechanics models despite the obvious physical inaccuracies that each incurs…
We present a framework for the simulation of rigid and deformable bodies in the presence of contact and friction. Our method is based on a non-smooth Newton iteration that solves the underlying nonlinear complementarity problems (NCPs)…
Robotic manipulation in unstructured environments requires planners to reason jointly about free-space motion and sustained, frictional contact with the environment. Existing (local) planning and simulation frameworks typically separate…
Two-dimensional (planar) rigid-body impact mechanics for application in automobile collisions have been described by a number of researchers over the last several decades. Little has been discussed, however, regarding three-dimensional…
Robotic manipulation can greatly benefit from the data efficiency, robustness, and predictability of model-based methods if robots can quickly generate models of novel objects they encounter. This is especially difficult when effects like…
Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and…
Simulation of contact and friction dynamics is an important basis for control- and learning-based algorithms. However, the numerical difficulties of contact interactions pose a challenge for robust and efficient simulators. A…
Accurate estimation of the environment structure simultaneously with the robot pose is a key capability of autonomous robotic vehicles. Classical simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms rely on the static world assumption to…
It is well-known that inverse dynamics models can improve tracking performance in robot control. These models need to precisely capture the robot dynamics, which consist of well-understood components, e.g., rigid body dynamics, and effects…
Action-conditioned robot world models generate future video frames of the manipulated scene given a robot action sequence, offering a promising alternative for simulating tasks that are difficult to model with traditional physics engines.…
We present a differentiable dynamics solver that is able to handle frictional contact for rigid and deformable objects within a unified framework. Through a principled mollification of normal and tangential contact forces, our method…
Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…
A general framework for performing event-driven simulations of systems with semi-flexible or rigid bodies interacting under impulsive torques and forces is outlined. Two different approaches are presented. In the first, the dynamics and…
This paper presents a system for enabling real-time synthesis of whole-body locomotion and manipulation policies for real-world legged robots. Motivated by recent advancements in robot simulation, we leverage the efficient parallelization…
Generating intelligent robot behavior in contact-rich settings is a research problem where zeroth-order methods currently prevail. A major contributor to the success of such methods is their robustness in the face of non-smooth and…