Related papers: Learning Deployable Locomotion Control via Differe…

Differentiable simulators provide analytic gradients, enabling more sample-efficient learning algorithms and paving the way for data intensive learning tasks such as learning from images. In this work, we demonstrate that locomotion…

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 agile locomotion for quadruped robots often requires extensive expertise and tedious manual tuning. In this paper, we present a system to automate this process by leveraging deep reinforcement learning techniques. Our system can…

Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…

With the maturation of differentiable physics, its role in various downstream applications: such as model predictive control, robotic design optimization, and neural PDE solvers, has become increasingly important. However, the derivative…

Accurate physics simulation is essential for robotic learning and control, yet analytical simulators often fail to capture complex contact dynamics, while learning-based simulators typically require large amounts of costly real-world data.…

The sample inefficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) remains a significant challenge in robotics. RL requires large-scale simulation and can still cause long training times, slowing research and innovation. This issue is particularly…

Deep reinforcement learning produces robust locomotion policies for legged robots over challenging terrains. To date, few studies have leveraged model-based methods to combine these locomotion skills with the precise control of…

Differentiable simulation is a promising toolkit for fast gradient-based policy optimization and system identification. However, existing approaches to differentiable simulation have largely tackled scenarios where obtaining smooth…

Developing control policies in simulation is often more practical and safer than directly running experiments in the real world. This applies to policies obtained from planning and optimization, and even more so to policies obtained from…

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…

Differentiable physics enables efficient gradient-based optimizations of neural network (NN) controllers. However, existing work typically only delivers NN controllers with limited capability and generalizability. We present a practical…

Frictional contact has been extensively studied as the core underlying behavior of legged locomotion and manipulation, and its nearly-discontinuous nature makes planning and control difficult even when an accurate model of the robot is…

We present a novel, fast differentiable simulator for soft-body learning and control applications. Existing differentiable soft-body simulators can be classified into two categories based on their time integration methods: Simulators using…

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.…

Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…

Robust closed-loop locomotion remains challenging for soft quadruped robots due to high-dimensional dynamics, actuator hysteresis, and difficult-to-model contact interactions, while conventional proprioception provides limited information…

Differentiable simulation enables gradients to be back-propagated through physics simulations. In this way, one can learn the dynamics and properties of a physics system by gradient-based optimization or embed the whole differentiable…

Contact forces introduce discontinuities into robot dynamics that severely limit the use of simulators for gradient-based optimization. Penalty-based simulators such as MuJoCo, soften contact resolution to enable gradient computation.…

High-fidelity physics simulation is essential for scalable robotic learning, but the sim-to-real gap persists, especially for tasks involving complex, dynamic, and discontinuous interactions like physical contacts. Explicit system…