ChainQueen: A Real-Time Differentiable Physical Simulator for Soft Robotics
Physical simulators have been widely used in robot planning and control. Among them, differentiable simulators are particularly favored, as they can be incorporated into gradient-based optimization algorithms that are efficient in solving inverse problems such as optimal control and motion planning. Simulating deformable objects is, however, more challenging compared to rigid body dynamics. The underlying physical laws of deformable objects are more complex, and the resulting systems have orders of magnitude more degrees of freedom and therefore they are significantly more computationally expensive to simulate. Computing gradients with respect to physical design or controller parameters is typically even more computationally challenging. In this paper, we propose a real-time, differentiable hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian physical simulator for deformable objects, ChainQueen, based on the Moving Least Squares Material Point Method (MLS-MPM). MLS-MPM can simulate deformable objects including contact and can be seamlessly incorporated into inference, control and co-design systems. We demonstrate that our simulator achieves high precision in both forward simulation and backward gradient computation. We have successfully employed it in a diverse set of control tasks for soft robots, including problems with nearly 3,000 decision variables.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Motion PlanningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
DiffSim2Real: Deploying Quadrupedal Locomotion Policies Purely Trained in Differentiable Simulation
Differentiable simulators provide analytic gradients, enabling more sample-efficient learning algorithms and paving the way for data intensive learning tasks such as learning from images. In this work, we demonstrate tha…
Gradient-based Trajectory Optimization with Parallelized Differentiable Traffic Simulation
We present a parallelized differentiable traffic simulator based on the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM), a car-following framework that incorporates driver behavior as key variables. Our vehicle simulator efficiently mode…
Trajectory PredictionDiffTaichi: Differentiable Programming for Physical Simulation
We present DiffTaichi, a new differentiable programming language tailored for building high-performance differentiable physical simulators. Based on an imperative programming language, DiffTaichi generates gradients of s…
Physical SimulationsPhysically Accurate Differentiable Inverse Rendering for Radio Frequency Digital Twin
Digital twins, virtual simulated replicas of physical scenes, are transforming system design across industries. However, their potential in radio frequency (RF) systems has been limited by the non-differentiable nature o…
Test-time AdaptationInverse RenderingDo Differentiable Simulators Give Better Policy Gradients?
Differentiable simulators promise faster computation time for reinforcement learning by replacing zeroth-order gradient estimates of a stochastic objective with an estimate based on first-order gradients. However, it is …