Related papers: Contact Points Discovery for Soft-Body Manipulatio…
We present a differentiable formulation of rigid-body contact dynamics for objects and robots represented as compositions of convex primitives. Existing optimization-based approaches simulating contact between convex primitives rely on a…
Differentiable contact kinematics are essential for gradient-based methods in robotics, yet the mapping from robot state to contact distance, location, and normal becomes non-smooth in degenerate configurations of shapes with zero or…
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…
In Part I of this two part series, we presented a multi-neighbor dependent contact model for adhesive elastic-plastic particles built upon the method of dimensionality reduction that is valid for the elastic and fully-plastic contact…
The current dominant paradigm for robotic manipulation involves two separate stages: manipulator design and control. Because the robot's morphology and how it can be controlled are intimately linked, joint optimization of design and control…
Soft particles can be better emulsifiers than hard particles because they stretch at fluid interfaces. This deformation can increase adsorption energies by orders of magnitude relative to rigid particles. The deformation of a particle at an…
Generating intelligent robot behavior in contact-rich settings is a research problem where zeroth-order methods currently prevail. Developing methods that make use of first/second order information about rigid-body dynamics in the presence…
We introduce KeypointDeformer, a novel unsupervised method for shape control through automatically discovered 3D keypoints. We cast this as the problem of aligning a source 3D object to a target 3D object from the same object category. Our…
Force modulation of robotic manipulators has been extensively studied for several decades. However, it is not yet commonly used in safety-critical applications due to a lack of accurate interaction contact modeling and weak performance…
In this paper, we study, from both variational and numerical points of view, a dynamic contact problem between a viscoelastic-viscoplastic piezoelectric body and a deformable obstacle. The contact is modelled using the classical normal…
Accurately handling contact with friction remains a core bottleneck for Material Point Method (MPM), from reliable contact point detection to enforcing frictional contact laws (non-penetration, Coulomb friction, and maximum dissipation…
This thesis deals with shape optimization for contact mechanics. More specifically, the linear elasticity model is considered under the small deformations hypothesis, and the elastic body is assumed to be in contact (sliding or with Tresca…
This paper investigates a framework (CATCH-FORM-3D) for the precise contact force control and surface deformation regulation in viscoelastic material manipulation. A partial differential equation (PDE) is proposed to model the…
All hand-object interaction is controlled by forces that the two bodies exert on each other, but little work has been done in modeling these underlying forces when doing pose and contact estimation from RGB/RGB-D data. Given the pose of the…
Barrier potentials gained popularity as a means for robust contact handling in physical modeling and for modeling self-avoiding shapes. The key to the success of these approaches is adherence to geometric constraints, i.e., avoiding…
Studying the manipulation of deformable linear objects has significant practical applications in industry, including car manufacturing, textile production, and electronics automation. However, deformable linear object manipulation poses a…
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…
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…
The friction and adhesion between elastic bodies are strongly influenced by the roughness of the surfaces in contact. Here we develop a multiscale molecular dynamics approach to contact mechanics, which can be used also when the surfaces…
Human motion synthesis and editing are essential to many applications like film post-production. However, they often introduce artefacts in motions, which can be detrimental to the perceived realism. In particular, footskating is a frequent…