Related papers: Single-Level Differentiable Contact Simulation
In this paper we present a new approach for dynamic motion planning for legged robots. We formulate a trajectory optimization problem based on a compact form of the robot dynamics. Such a form is obtained by projecting the rigid body…
Many problems in modern robotics can be addressed by modeling them as bilevel optimization problems. In this work, we leverage augmented Lagrangian methods and recent advances in automatic differentiation to develop a general-purpose…
We present a quasi-static finite element simulator for human face animation. We model the face as an actuated soft body, which can be efficiently simulated using Projective Dynamics (PD). We adopt Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) to…
Specifying tasks with videos is a powerful technique towards acquiring novel and general robot skills. However, reasoning over mechanics and dexterous interactions can make it challenging to scale learning contact-rich manipulation. In this…
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…
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…
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…
Simulation modeling of robots, objects, and environments is the backbone for all model-based control and learning. It is leveraged broadly across dynamic programming and model-predictive control, as well as data generation for imitation,…
This paper presents a novel approach using sensitivity analysis for generalizing Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) to systems characterized by implicit dynamics, such as those modelled via inverse dynamics and variational or implicit…
Daily tasks require us to use our whole body to manipulate objects, for instance when our hands are unavailable. We consider the issue of providing humanoid robots with the ability to autonomously perform similar whole-body manipulation…
Combustion kinetic modeling is an integral part of combustion simulation, and extensive studies have been devoted to developing both high fidelity and computationally affordable models. Despite these efforts, modeling combustion kinetics is…
Manipulating deformable objects arises in daily life and numerous applications. Despite phenomenal advances in industrial robotics, manipulation of deformable objects remains mostly a manual task. This is because of the high number of…
Existing methods for reconstructing interactive scenes primarily focus on replacing reconstructed objects with CAD models retrieved from a limited database, resulting in significant discrepancies between the reconstructed and observed…
Simulations of many rigid bodies colliding with each other sometimes yield particularly interesting results if the colliding objects differ significantly in size and are non-spherical. The most expensive part within such a simulation code…
In this paper, we introduce a novel parallel contact algorithm designed to run efficiently in High-Performance Computing based supercomputers. Particular emphasis is put on its computational implementation in a multiphysics finite element…
Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
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…
Humans can exploit contacts anywhere on their body surface to manipulate large and heavy items, objects normally out of reach or multiple objects at once. However, such manipulation through contacts using the whole surface of the body…
We define "robotic contact juggling" to be the purposeful control of the motion of a three-dimensional smooth object as it rolls freely on a motion-controlled robot manipulator, or "hand." While specific examples of robotic contact juggling…
Control techniques like MPC can realize contact-rich manipulation which exploits dynamic information, maintaining friction limits and safety constraints. However, contact geometry and dynamics are required to be known. This information is…