Related papers: End-to-End and Highly-Efficient Differentiable Sim…
Robotic cutting of soft materials is critical for applications such as food processing, household automation, and surgical manipulation. As in other areas of robotics, simulators can facilitate controller verification, policy learning, and…
Efficient robot dynamics simulation is a fundamental problem key for robot control, identification, design and analysis. This research statement explores my current progress in this field and future research directions.
We report analytical equations for the derivatives of spin dynamics simulations with respect to pulse sequence and spin system parameters. The methods described are significantly faster, more accurate and more reliable than the finite…
Robotics simulation plays an important role in the design, development, and verification and validation of robotic systems. Recent studies have shown that simulation may be used as a cheaper, safer, and more reliable alternative to manual,…
Simulators are a critical component of modern robotics research. Strategies for both perception and decision making can be studied in simulation first before deployed to real world systems, saving on time and costs. Despite significant…
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…
This paper develops a surrogate model refinement approach for the simulation of dynamical systems and the solution of optimization problems governed by dynamical systems in which surrogates replace expensive-to-compute state- and…
Accurate physical simulation is crucial for the development and validation of control algorithms in robotic systems. Recent works in Reinforcement Learning (RL) take notably advantage of extensive simulations to produce efficient robot…
Obstacle avoidance is a fundamental vision-based task essential for enabling quadrotors to perform advanced applications. When planning the trajectory, existing approaches both on optimization and learning typically regard quadrotor as a…
Model-based control for robots has increasingly been dependent on optimization-based methods like Differential Dynamic Programming and iterative LQR (iLQR). These methods can form the basis of Model-Predictive Control (MPC), which is…
Differentiable simulators promise to improve sample efficiency in robot learning by providing analytic gradients of the system dynamics. Yet, their application to contact-rich tasks like locomotion is complicated by the inherently…
An important field in robotics is the optimization of controllers. Currently, robots are often treated as a black box in this optimization process, which is the reason why derivative-free optimization methods such as evolutionary algorithms…
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…
Simulators are an important tool in robotics that is used to develop robot software and generate synthetic data for machine learning algorithms. Faster simulation can result in better software validation and larger amounts of data. Previous…
Dynamic simulators are computational models governed by differential equations that evolve over time. They are essential for scientific and engineering applications but remain challenging to emulate because of the unpredictable behavior of…
Robotic manipulation and locomotion often entail nearly-simultaneous collisions -- such as heel and toe strikes during a foot step -- with outcomes that are extremely sensitive to the order in which impacts occur. Robotic simulators…
Rapid robotic system development sets a demand for multi-disciplinary methods and tools to explore and compare design alternatives. In this paper, we present collaborative modeling that combines discrete-event models of controller software…
Simulation is an important step in robotics for creating control policies and testing various physical parameters. Soft robotics is a field that presents unique physical challenges for simulating its subjects due to the nonlinearity of…
Simulation is an efficient tool in the design and control of power electronic systems. However, quick and accurate simulation of them is still challenging, especially when the system contains a large number of switches and state variables.…
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…