Related papers: CENIC: Convex Error-controlled Numerical Integrati…
Physics-based simulation is essential for developing and evaluating robot manipulation policies, particularly in scenarios involving deformable objects and complex contact interactions. However, existing simulators often struggle to balance…
Controlling contacts is truly challenging, and this has been a major hurdle to deploying industrial robots into unstructured/human-centric environments. More specifically, the main challenges are: (i) how to ensure stability at all times;…
The large-scale simulation of dynamical systems is critical in numerous scientific and engineering disciplines. However, traditional numerical solvers are limited by the choice of step sizes when estimating integration, resulting in a…
With the explosive growth of rigid-body simulators, policy learning in simulation has become the de facto standard for most rigid morphologies. In contrast, soft robotic simulation frameworks remain scarce and are seldom adopted by the soft…
Many problems in robotics involve creating or breaking multiple contacts nearly simultaneously or in an indeterminate order. We present a novel general purpose numerical integrator based on the theory of Event Selected Systems (ESS). Many…
We propose a novel fast and accurate simulation framework for contact-intensive tight-tolerance robotic assembly tasks. The key components of our framework are as follows: 1) data-driven contact point clustering with a certain…
When simulating partial differential equations, hybrid solvers combine coarse numerical solvers with learned correctors. They promise accelerated simulations while adhering to physical constraints. However, as shown in our theoretical…
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…
Simulating rigid-body dynamics with contact in a fast, massively vectorizable, and smoothly differentiable manner is highly desirable in robotics. An important bottleneck faced by existing differentiable simulation frameworks is contact…
Robotic practitioners generally approach the vision-based SLAM problem through discrete-time formulations. This has the advantage of a consolidated theory and very good understanding of success and failure cases. However, discrete-time SLAM…
It has previously been shown that varying the numerical timestep during a symplectic orbital integration leads to a random walk in energy and angular momentum, destroying the phase space-conserving property of symplectic integrators. Here…
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…
This new approach allows the user to experiment with model choices easily and quickly without requiring in-depth expertise, as constitutive models can be modified by one line of code only. This ease in building new models makes SOniCS ideal…
Time-symmetric integration schemes share with symplectic schemes the property that their energy errors show a much better behavior than is the case for generic integration schemes. Allowing adaptive time steps typically leads to a loss of…
A realistic simulation environment is an essential tool in every roboticist's toolkit, with uses ranging from planning and control to training policies with reinforcement learning. Despite the centrality of simulation in modern robotics,…
The small size, high dexterity, and intrinsic compliance of continuum robots (CRs) make them well suited for constrained environments. Solving the inverse kinematics (IK), that is finding robot joint configurations that satisfy desired…
This paper proposes a novel fixed-time integral sliding mode controller for admittance control to enhance physical human-robot collaboration. The proposed method combines the benefits of compliance to external forces of admittance control…
We review error estimation methods for co-simulation, in particular methods that are applicable when the subsystems provide minimal interfaces. By this, we mean that subsystems do not support rollback of time steps, do not output…
Symplectic integration algorithms have become popular in recent years in long-term orbital integrations because these algorithms enforce certain conservation laws that are intrinsic to Hamiltonian systems. For problems with large variations…
Contact-implicit motion planning-embedding contact sequencing as implicit complementarity constraints-holds the promise of leveraging continuous optimization to discover new contact patterns online. Nevertheless, the resulting optimization,…