Related papers: A Physics-Based Continuum Model for Versatile, Sca…
This thesis presents a unified modeling and simulation framework for analyzing sidewinding and tumbling locomotion of the COBRA snake robot across rigid, compliant, and granular terrains. A contact-implicit formulation is used to model…
Large-scale simulation studies can provide invaluable insights across computational engineering efforts, but they are often computationally demanding, requiring the use of distributed computing, which is itself not a simple task.…
This paper introduces DEM-Engine, a new submodule of Project Chrono, that is designed to carry out Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulations. Based on spherical primitive shapes, DEM-Engine can simulate polydisperse granular materials and…
High-fidelity physics simulation is essential for closing the sim-to-real gap in robotics and complex mechanical systems. However, the computational overhead of high-fidelity engines often limits their use in data-intensive tasks like…
The wheel-soil interaction has great impact on the dynamics of off-road vehicles in terramechanics applications. The Soil Contact Model (SCM), which anchors an empirical method to characterize the frictional contact between a wheel and…
The Discrete Element Method (DEM) is frequently used to model complex granular systems and to augment the knowledge that we obtain through theory, experimentation, and real-world observations. Numerical simulations are a particularly…
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…
This contribution reports on a software framework that uses physically-based rendering to simulate camera operation in lunar conditions. The focus is on generating synthetic images qualitatively similar to those produced by an actual camera…
The long runtime of high-fidelity partial differential equation (PDE) solvers makes them unsuitable for time-critical applications. We propose to accelerate PDE solvers using reduced-order modeling (ROM). Whereas prior ROM approaches reduce…
From both an educational and research point of view, experiments on hardware are a key aspect of robotics and control. In the last decade, many open-source hardware and software frameworks for wheeled robots have been presented, mainly in…
A multiscale model for real-time simulation of terrain dynamics is explored. To represent the dynamics on different scales the model combines the description of soil as a continuous solid, as distinct particles and as rigid multibodies. The…
High-fidelity simulators for the lunar surface provide a digital environment for extensive testing of rover operations and mission planning. However, current simulators focus on either visual realism or physical accuracy, which limits their…
The numerical simulation of the physical systems has become in recent years a fundamental tool to perform analyses and predictions in several application fields, spanning from industry to the academy. As far as large scale simulations are…
Simulations of hadronic and nuclear interactions are essential in both collider and astroparticle physics. The Chromo package provides a unified Python interface to multiple widely used hadronic event generators, including EPOS, DPMJet,…
Perceiving and understanding highly dynamic and changing environments is a crucial capability for robot autonomy. While large strides have been made towards developing dynamic SLAM approaches that estimate the robot pose accurately, a…
We present Kamino, a GPU-based physics solver for massively parallel simulations of heterogeneous highly-coupled mechanical systems. Implemented in Python using NVIDIA Warp and integrated into the Newton framework, it enables the…
While simulation is vital for optimizing robotic systems, the cost of modeling deformable terrain has long limited its use in full-vehicle studies of off-road autonomous mobility. For example, Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulations are…
Continual reinforcement learning (CRL) requires agents to learn from a sequence of tasks without forgetting previously acquired policies. In this work, we introduce a novel benchmark suite for CRL based on realistically simulated robots in…
Modeling a robust control system with a precise GPS-based state estimation capability in simulation can be useful in field navigation applications as it allows for testing and validation in a controlled environment. This testing process…
Development of algorithms and growth of computational resources in the past decades have enabled simulations of sediment transport processes with unprecedented fidelities. The Computational Fluid Dynamics--Discrete Element Method (CFD--DEM)…