Related papers: PlasticineLab: A Soft-Body Manipulation Benchmark …

We consider the problem of sequential robotic manipulation of deformable objects using tools. Previous works have shown that differentiable physics simulators provide gradients to the environment state and help trajectory optimization to…

Fast, accurate, and generalizable simulations are a key enabler of modern advances in robot design and control. However, existing simulation frameworks in robotics either model rigid environments and mechanisms only, or if they include…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great success in learning complex control policies for a variety of applications in robotics. However, in most such cases, the hardware of the robot has been considered immutable, modeled as part…

In recent years, an increasing amount of work has focused on differentiable physics simulation and has produced a set of open source projects such as Tiny Differentiable Simulator, Nimble Physics, diffTaichi, Brax, Warp, Dojo and DiffCoSim.…

This work explores the potential of using differentiable simulation for learning quadruped locomotion. Differentiable simulation promises fast convergence and stable training by computing low-variance first-order gradients using robot…

Designing physical artifacts that serve a purpose - such as tools and other functional structures - is central to engineering as well as everyday human behavior. Though automating design has tremendous promise, general-purpose methods do…

Differentiable physics is a powerful approach to learning and control problems that involve physical objects and environments. While notable progress has been made, the capabilities of differentiable physics solvers remain limited. We…

As compute power increases with time, more involved and larger simulations become possible. However, it gets increasingly difficult to efficiently use the provided computational resources. Especially in particle-based simulations with a…

Intelligent agents need a physical understanding of the world to predict the impact of their actions in the future. While learning-based models of the environment dynamics have contributed to significant improvements in sample efficiency…

Robot manipulation in cluttered scenes often requires contact-rich interactions with objects. It can be more economical to interact via non-prehensile actions, for example, push through other objects to get to the desired grasp pose,…

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…

Differentiable simulators provide an avenue for closing the sim-to-real gap by enabling the use of efficient, gradient-based optimization algorithms to find the simulation parameters that best fit the observed sensor readings. Nonetheless,…

Continual Learning requires a model to learn multiple tasks in sequence while maintaining both stability:preserving knowledge from previously learned tasks, and plasticity:effectively learning new tasks. Gradient projection has emerged as…

Evaluating the scientific discovery capabilities of large language model based agents, particularly how they cope with varying environmental complexity and utilize prior knowledge, requires specialized benchmarks currently lacking in the…

Differentiable rendering has gained significant attention in the field of robotics, with differentiable robot rendering emerging as an effective paradigm for learning robotic actions from image-space supervision. However, the lack of…

Deformable object manipulation is a long-standing challenge in robotics. While existing approaches often focus narrowly on a specific type of object, we seek a general-purpose algorithm, capable of manipulating many different types of…

Grasping deformable objects is not well researched due to the complexity in modelling and simulating the dynamic behavior of such objects. However, with the rapid development of physics-based simulators that support soft bodies, the…

We present a differentiable soft-body physics simulator that can be composed with neural networks as a differentiable layer. In contrast to other differentiable physics approaches that use explicit forward models to define state…

Although robotic applications increasingly demand versatile and dynamic object handling, most existing techniques are predominantly focused on grasp-based manipulation, limiting their applicability in non-prehensile tasks. To address this…

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…