Related papers: PlasticineLab: A Soft-Body Manipulation Benchmark …
In this work, we aim to teach robots to manipulate various thin-shell materials. Prior works studying thin-shell object manipulation mostly rely on heuristic policies or learn policies from real-world video demonstrations, and only focus on…
Manipulating deformable objects has long been a challenge in robotics due to its high dimensional state representation and complex dynamics. Recent success in deep reinforcement learning provides a promising direction for learning to…
Dynamic state representation learning is an important task in robot learning. Latent space that can capture dynamics related information has wide application in areas such as accelerating model free reinforcement learning, closing the…
Developing lifelong learning agents is crucial for artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems often suffer from plasticity loss, where neural networks gradually lose their ability to adapt…
Manipulating garments and fabrics has long been a critical endeavor in the development of home-assistant robots. However, due to complex dynamics and topological structures, garment manipulations pose significant challenges. Recent…
Differentiable simulation is a promising toolkit for fast gradient-based policy optimization and system identification. However, existing approaches to differentiable simulation have largely tackled scenarios where obtaining smooth…
Combining gradient-based trajectory optimization with differentiable physics simulation is an efficient technique for solving soft-body manipulation problems. Using a well-crafted optimization objective, the solver can quickly converge onto…
We present DiffTaichi, a new differentiable programming language tailored for building high-performance differentiable physical simulators. Based on an imperative programming language, DiffTaichi generates gradients of simulation steps…
Deformable Object Manipulation (DOM) is of significant importance to both daily and industrial applications. Recent successes in differentiable physics simulators allow learning algorithms to train a policy with analytic gradients through…
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…
Particle robots are novel biologically-inspired robotic systems where locomotion can be achieved collectively and robustly, but not independently. While its control is currently limited to a hand-crafted policy for basic locomotion tasks,…
Deep reinforcement learning can generate complex control policies, but requires large amounts of training data to work effectively. Recent work has attempted to address this issue by leveraging differentiable simulators. However, inherent…
We propose a novel iterative approach for crossing the reality gap that utilises live robot rollouts and differentiable physics. Our method, RealityGrad, demonstrates for the first time, an efficient sim2real transfer in combination with a…
Real-life control tasks involve matters of various substances---rigid or soft bodies, liquid, gas---each with distinct physical behaviors. This poses challenges to traditional rigid-body physics engines. Particle-based simulators have been…
Recent advances in GPU-based parallel simulation have enabled practitioners to collect large amounts of data and train complex control policies using deep reinforcement learning (RL), on commodity GPUs. However, such successes for RL in…
We introduce DIFFTACTILE, a physics-based differentiable tactile simulation system designed to enhance robotic manipulation with dense and physically accurate tactile feedback. In contrast to prior tactile simulators which primarily focus…
Physical simulators have been widely used in robot planning and control. Among them, differentiable simulators are particularly favored, as they can be incorporated into gradient-based optimization algorithms that are efficient in solving…
Differentiable physics enables efficient gradient-based optimizations of neural network (NN) controllers. However, existing work typically only delivers NN controllers with limited capability and generalizability. We present a practical…
We apply reinforcement learning (RL) to robotics tasks. One of the drawbacks of traditional RL algorithms has been their poor sample efficiency. One approach to improve the sample efficiency is model-based RL. In our model-based RL…
We present a method for differentiable simulation of soft articulated bodies. Our work enables the integration of differentiable physical dynamics into gradient-based pipelines. We develop a top-down matrix assembly algorithm within…