Related papers: Improving Gradient Computation for Differentiable …
We present Dojo, a differentiable physics engine for robotics that prioritizes stable simulation, accurate contact physics, and differentiability with respect to states, actions, and system parameters. Dojo models hard contact and friction…
Model-free and model-based reinforcement learning are two ends of a spectrum. Learning a good policy without a dynamic model can be prohibitively expensive. Learning the dynamic model of a system can reduce the cost of learning the policy,…
Trajectory optimization methods have achieved an exceptional level of performance on real-world robots in recent years. These methods heavily rely on accurate analytical models of the dynamics, yet some aspects of the physical world can…
Simulation of contact and friction dynamics is an important basis for control- and learning-based algorithms. However, the numerical difficulties of contact interactions pose a challenge for robust and efficient simulators. A…
We present Jade, a differentiable physics engine for articulated rigid bodies. Jade models contacts as the Linear Complementarity Problem (LCP). Compared to existing differentiable simulations, Jade offers features including…
Optimization of beamlines and lattices is a common problem in accelerator physics, which is usually solved with semi-analytical methods and numerical optimization routines. However, these are usually of the gradient-free or…
We present DiffXPBD, a novel and efficient analytical formulation for the differentiable position-based simulation of compliant constrained dynamics (XPBD). Our proposed method allows computation of gradients of numerous parameters with…
The gradients used to train neural networks are typically computed using backpropagation. While an efficient way to obtain exact gradients, backpropagation is computationally expensive, hinders parallelization, and is biologically…
Reinforcement learning often requires extensive training data. Simulation-to-real transfer offers a promising approach to address this challenge in robotics. While differentiable simulators offer improved sample efficiency through exact…
The optimization of physical parameters serves various purposes, such as system identification and efficiency in developing devices. Spin-torque oscillators have been applied to neuromorphic computing experimentally and theoretically, but…
Collision detection plays an important role in simulation, control, and learning for robotic systems. However, no existing method is differentiable with respect to the configurations of the objects, greatly limiting the sort of algorithms…
We propose a new technique for pushing an unknown object from an initial configuration to a goal configuration with stability constraints. The proposed method leverages recent progress in differentiable physics models to learn unknown…
It is common to manufacture an object by decomposing it into parts that can be assembled. This decomposition is often required by size limits of the machine, the complex structure of the shape, etc. To make it possible to easily assemble…
Computing the gradient of a function provides fundamental information about its behavior. This information is essential for several applications and algorithms across various fields. One common application that require gradients are…
Robot design optimization, imitation learning and system identification share a common problem which requires optimization over robot or task parameters at the same time as optimizing the robot motion. To solve these problems, we can use…
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…
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…
Forward Gradients - the idea of using directional derivatives in forward differentiation mode - have recently been shown to be utilizable for neural network training while avoiding problems generally associated with backpropagation gradient…
We systematically develop a learning-based treatment of stochastic optimal control (SOC), relying on direct optimization of parametric control policies. We propose a derivation of adjoint sensitivity results for stochastic differential…
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…