Paper
Differentiable Material Point Method for the Control of Deformable Objects
Authors
Diego Bolliger, Gabriele Fadini, Markus Bambach, Alisa Rupenyan
Abstract
Controlling the deformation of flexible objects is challenging due to their non-linear dynamics and high-dimensional configuration space. This work presents a differentiable Material Point Method (MPM) simulator targeted at control applications. We exploit the differentiability of the simulator to optimize a control trajectory in an active damping problem for a hyperelastic rope. The simulator effectively minimizes the kinetic energy of the rope around 2 faster than a baseline MPPI method and to a 20% lower energy level, while using about 3% of the computation time.