Related papers: End-to-End and Highly-Efficient Differentiable Sim…
Differentiable simulators represent an environment's dynamics as a differentiable function. Within robotics and autonomous driving, this property is used in Analytic Policy Gradients (APG), which relies on backpropagating through the…
Generating intelligent robot behavior in contact-rich settings is a research problem where zeroth-order methods currently prevail. A major contributor to the success of such methods is their robustness in the face of non-smooth and…
Quantitatively evaluating and comparing the performance of robotic solutions that are designed to work under a variety of conditions is inherently challenging because they need to be evaluated under numerous precisely repeatable conditions…
In this paper, we introduce a technique to enhance the computational efficiency of solution algorithms for high-dimensional discrete simulation-based optimization problems. The technique is based on innovative adaptive partitioning…
Optimization time integrators are effective at solving complex multi-physics problems including deformable solids with non-linear material models, contact with friction, strain limiting, etc. For challenging problems, Newton-type optimizers…
Building differentiable simulations of physical processes has recently received an increasing amount of attention. Specifically, some efforts develop differentiable robotic physics engines motivated by the computational benefits of merging…
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 addresses the problem of efficiently computing higher-order variational integrators in simulation and trajectory optimization of mechanical systems as those often found in robotic applications. We develop $O(n)$ algorithms to…
Soft robots can safely interact with environments because of their mechanical compliance. Self-collision is also employed in the modern design of soft robots to enhance their performance during different tasks. However, developing an…
Accurate derivatives are important for efficiently locally traversing and converging in quantum optimization landscapes. By deriving analytically exact control derivatives (gradient and Hessian) for unitary control tasks, we show here that…
In contrast to conventional robots, accurately modeling the kinematics and statics of continuum robots is challenging due to partially unknown material properties, parasitic effects, or unknown forces acting on the continuous body.…
Aquatic locomotion is a classic fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problem of interest to biologists and engineers. Solving the fully coupled FSI equations for incompressible Navier-Stokes and finite elasticity is computationally expensive.…
Surrogate models for computational simulations are input-output approximations that allow computationally intensive analyses, such as uncertainty propagation and inference, to be performed efficiently. When a simulation output does not…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At…
Control systems are at the core of every real-world robot. They are deployed in an ever-increasing number of applications, ranging from autonomous racing and search-and-rescue missions to industrial inspections and space exploration. To…
We present a versatile framework for the computational co-design of legged robots and dynamic maneuvers. Current state-of-the-art approaches are typically based on random sampling or concurrent optimization. We propose a novel bilevel…
Cloth simulation has wide applications in computer animation, garment design, and robot-assisted dressing. This work presents a differentiable cloth simulator whose additional gradient information facilitates cloth-related applications. Our…
Accurate and efficient simulation tools are essential in robotics, enabling the visualization of system dynamics and the validation of control laws before committing resources to physical experimentation. Developing physically accurate…
Matching the swimming efficiency and agility of fish has remained an elusive goal in underwater robotics. Such locomotion capabilities rely on complex vortex interactions between the robot's body and the surrounding fluid. However,…
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…