Related papers: Differentiable Simulation of Soft Robots with Fric…
Over the past few years, robotics simulators have largely improved in efficiency and scalability, enabling them to generate years of simulated data in a few hours. Yet, efficiently and accurately computing the simulation derivatives remains…
We present a differentiable dynamics solver that is able to handle frictional contact for rigid and deformable objects within a unified framework. Through a principled mollification of normal and tangential contact forces, our method…
Algorithms that use derivatives of governing equations have accelerated rigid robot simulations and improved their accuracy, enabling the modeling of complex, real-world capabilities. However, extending these methods to soft and hybrid…
Differentiable physics simulation provides an avenue to tackle previously intractable challenges through gradient-based optimization, thereby greatly improving the efficiency of solving robotics-related problems. To apply differentiable…
An accurate, physically-based, and differentiable model of soft robots can unlock downstream applications in optimal control. The Finite Element Method (FEM) is an expressive approach for modeling highly deformable structures such as…
Efficient planning of assembly motions is a long standing challenge in the field of robotics that has been primarily tackled with reinforcement learning and sampling-based methods by using extensive physics simulations. This paper proposes…
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.…
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…
We present a method for differentiable simulation of soft articulated bodies. Our work enables the integration of differentiable physical dynamics into gradient-based pipelines. We develop a top-down matrix assembly algorithm within…
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…
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…
We present a computational framework for simulating filaments interacting with rigid bodies through contact. Filaments are challenging to simulate due to their codimensionality, i.e., they are one-dimensional structures embedded in…
The simulation of multi-body systems with frictional contacts is a fundamental tool for many fields, such as robotics, computer graphics, and mechanics. Hard frictional contacts are particularly troublesome to simulate because they make the…
We present a differentiable formulation of rigid-body contact dynamics for objects and robots represented as compositions of convex primitives. Existing optimization-based approaches simulating contact between convex primitives rely on a…
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…
Whether rigid or compliant, contact interactions are inherent to robot motions, enabling them to move or manipulate things. Contact interactions result from complex physical phenomena, that can be mathematically cast as Nonlinear…
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…
In this paper, we introduce a novel convex formulation that seamlessly integrates the Material Point Method (MPM) with articulated rigid body dynamics in frictional contact scenarios. We extend the linear corotational hyperelastic model…
Physics simulation is ubiquitous in robotics. Whether in model-based approaches (e.g., trajectory optimization), or model-free algorithms (e.g., reinforcement learning), physics simulators are a central component of modern control pipelines…
Soft robots are typically approximated as low-dimensional systems, especially when learning-based methods are used. This leads to models that are limited in their capability to predict the large number of deformation modes and interactions…