Related papers: Single-Level Differentiable Contact Simulation
Robots must make and break contact with the environment to perform useful tasks, but planning and control through contact remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we achieve real-time contact-implicit model predictive control with a…
This paper presents a novel simulation platform, ZeMa, designed for robotic manipulation tasks concerning soft objects. Such simulation ideally requires three properties: two-way soft-rigid coupling, intersection-free guarantees, and…
We introduce JAX MD, a software package for performing differentiable physics simulations with a focus on molecular dynamics. JAX MD includes a number of physics simulation environments, as well as interaction potentials and neural networks…
State-of-the-art object pose estimation methods are prone to generating geometrically infeasible pose hypotheses. This problem is prevalent in dexterous manipulation, where estimated poses often intersect with the robotic hand or are not…
Most camera lens systems are designed in isolation, separately from downstream computer vision methods. Recently, joint optimization approaches that design lenses alongside other components of the image acquisition and processing pipeline…
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,…
Several physical systems in condensed matter have been modeled approximating their constituent particles as hard objects. The hard spheres model has been indeed one of the cornerstones of the computational and theoretical description in…
The incorporation of appropriate inductive bias plays a critical role in learning dynamics from data. A growing body of work has been exploring ways to enforce energy conservation in the learned dynamics by encoding Lagrangian or…
We propose a methodology to infer collision operators from phase space data of plasma dynamics. Our approach combines a differentiable kinetic simulator, whose core component in this work is a differentiable Fokker-Planck solver, with a…
It is significantly challenging to obtain accurate contact forces in peridynamics (PD) simulations due to the difficulty of surface particles identification, particularly for complex geometries. Here, an improved point-to-surface contact…
In this work, we present a hybrid simulator for space docking and robotic proximity operations methodology. This methodology also allows for the emulation of a target robot operating in a complex environment by using an actual robot. The…
We propose new sequential simulation-optimization algorithms for general convex optimization via simulation problems with high-dimensional discrete decision space. The performance of each choice of discrete decision variables is evaluated…
This paper presents a contact-implicit model predictive control (MPC) framework for the real-time discovery of multi-contact motions, without predefined contact mode sequences or foothold positions. This approach utilizes the…
Planning robot dexterity is challenging due to the non-smoothness introduced by contacts, intricate fine motions, and ever-changing scenarios. We present a hierarchical planning framework for dexterous robotic manipulation (HiDex). This…
Contact modeling plays a central role in motion planning, simulation, and control of legged robots, as legged locomotion is realized through contact. The two prevailing approaches to model the contact consider rigid and compliant premise at…
This paper extends the Finite Elements with Switch Detection and Jumps (FESD-J) [1] method to problems of rigid body dynamics involving patch contacts. The FESD-J method is a high accuracy discretization scheme suitable for use in direct…
Robotic dexterous in-hand manipulation, where multiple fingers dynamically make and break contact, represents a step toward human-like dexterity in real-world robotic applications. Unlike learning-based approaches that rely on large-scale…
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…
Many robotics applications, from object manipulation to locomotion, require planning methods that are capable of handling the dynamics of contact. Trajectory optimization has been shown to be a viable approach that can be made to support…
Soft robots have garnered significant attention due to their promising applications across various domains. A hallmark of these systems is their bilayer structure, where strain mismatch caused by differential expansion between layers…