Related papers: ComFree-Sim: A GPU-Parallelized Analytical Contact…
Multibody simulation with frictional contact has been a challenging subject of research for the past thirty years. Rigid-body assumptions are commonly used to approximate the physics of contact, and together with Coulomb friction, lead to…
Physical interactive robotics, ranging from wearable devices to collaborative humanoid robots, require close coordination between mechanical design and control. However, evaluating interactive dynamics is challenging due to complex human…
Grasping is fundamental to robotic manipulation, and recent advances in large-scale grasping datasets have provided essential training data and evaluation benchmarks, accelerating the development of learning-based methods for robust object…
For safe and reliable deployment of any robot controller on the real hardware platform, it is generally a necessary practice to comprehensively assess the performance of the controller with the specific robot in a realistic simulation…
Previous humanoid robot research works treat the robot as a bipedal mobile manipulation platform, where only the feet and hands contact the environment. However, we humans use all body parts to interact with the world, e.g., we sit in…
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…
In this paper, we propose a model predictive control (MPC) that accomplishes interactive robotic tasks, in which multiple contacts may occur at unknown locations. To address such scenarios, we made an explicit contact feedback loop in the…
This paper presents a novel contact-implicit trajectory optimization method using an analytically solvable contact model to enable planning of interactions with hard, soft, and slippery environments. Specifically, we propose a novel contact…
Our goal is to develop an efficient contact detection algorithm for large-scale GPU-based simulation of non-convex objects. Current GPU-based simulators such as IsaacGym and Brax must trade-off speed with fidelity, generality, or both when…
We present a novel communication-free algorithm for individual-based probabilistic neutral biodiversity simulations. The algorithm transforms a neutral Moran ecosystem model into an embarrassingly parallel problem by trading off…
We present a novel convex formulation that weakly couples the Material Point Method (MPM) with rigid body dynamics through frictional contact, optimized for efficient GPU parallelization. Our approach features an asynchronous time-splitting…
This article presents computationally efficient algorithms for modeling two special cases of rigid contact---contact with only viscous friction and contact without slip---that have particularly useful applications in robotic locomotion and…
We present a fast and feature-complete differentiable physics engine, Nimble (nimblephysics.org), that supports Lagrangian dynamics and hard contact constraints for articulated rigid body simulation. Our differentiable physics engine offers…
Accurate physics simulation is essential for robotic learning and control, yet analytical simulators often fail to capture complex contact dynamics, while learning-based simulators typically require large amounts of costly real-world data.…
Magnetic rolling microrobots enable gentle manipulation in confined microfluidic environments, yet autonomy for contact-rich behaviors such as cell pushing and multi-target assembly remains difficult to develop and evaluate reproducibly. We…
Differentiable simulators provide an avenue for closing the sim-to-real gap by enabling the use of efficient, gradient-based optimization algorithms to find the simulation parameters that best fit the observed sensor readings. Nonetheless,…
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…
Development of applications related to closed-loop control requires either testing on the field or on a realistic simulator, with the latter being more convenient, inexpensive, safe, and leading to shorter development cycles. To address…
Continuum robots offer high flexibility and multiple degrees of freedom, making them ideal for navigating narrow lumens. However, accurately modeling their behavior under large deformations and frequent environmental contacts remains…
A significant barrier preventing model-based methods from achieving real-time and versatile dexterous robotic manipulation is the inherent complexity of multi-contact dynamics. Traditionally formulated as complementarity models,…