6,689 research outputs found
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.Comment: In submission to ICRA 2019. Supplemental Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IWD4iGIsB4 Project Page:
https://github.com/yuanming-hu/ChainQuee
Reasoning About Liquids via Closed-Loop Simulation
Simulators are powerful tools for reasoning about a robot's interactions with
its environment. However, when simulations diverge from reality, that reasoning
becomes less useful. In this paper, we show how to close the loop between
liquid simulation and real-time perception. We use observations of liquids to
correct errors when tracking the liquid's state in a simulator. Our results
show that closed-loop simulation is an effective way to prevent large
divergence between the simulated and real liquid states. As a direct
consequence of this, our method can enable reasoning about liquids that would
otherwise be infeasible due to large divergences, such as reasoning about
occluded liquid.Comment: Robotics: Science & Systems (RSS), July 12-16, 2017. Cambridge, MA,
US
Fast Simulation of Vehicles with Non-deformable Tracks
This paper presents a novel technique that allows for both computationally
fast and sufficiently plausible simulation of vehicles with non-deformable
tracks. The method is based on an effect we have called Contact Surface Motion.
A comparison with several other methods for simulation of tracked vehicle
dynamics is presented with the aim to evaluate methods that are available
off-the-shelf or with minimum effort in general-purpose robotics simulators.
The proposed method is implemented as a plugin for the open-source
physics-based simulator Gazebo using the Open Dynamics Engine.Comment: Submitted to IROS 201
FlightGoggles: A Modular Framework for Photorealistic Camera, Exteroceptive Sensor, and Dynamics Simulation
FlightGoggles is a photorealistic sensor simulator for perception-driven
robotic vehicles. The key contributions of FlightGoggles are twofold. First,
FlightGoggles provides photorealistic exteroceptive sensor simulation using
graphics assets generated with photogrammetry. Second, it provides the ability
to combine (i) synthetic exteroceptive measurements generated in silico in real
time and (ii) vehicle dynamics and proprioceptive measurements generated in
motio by vehicle(s) in a motion-capture facility. FlightGoggles is capable of
simulating a virtual-reality environment around autonomous vehicle(s). While a
vehicle is in flight in the FlightGoggles virtual reality environment,
exteroceptive sensors are rendered synthetically in real time while all complex
extrinsic dynamics are generated organically through the natural interactions
of the vehicle. The FlightGoggles framework allows for researchers to
accelerate development by circumventing the need to estimate complex and
hard-to-model interactions such as aerodynamics, motor mechanics, battery
electrochemistry, and behavior of other agents. The ability to perform
vehicle-in-the-loop experiments with photorealistic exteroceptive sensor
simulation facilitates novel research directions involving, e.g., fast and
agile autonomous flight in obstacle-rich environments, safe human interaction,
and flexible sensor selection. FlightGoggles has been utilized as the main test
for selecting nine teams that will advance in the AlphaPilot autonomous drone
racing challenge. We survey approaches and results from the top AlphaPilot
teams, which may be of independent interest.Comment: Initial version appeared at IROS 2019. Supplementary material can be
found at https://flightgoggles.mit.edu. Revision includes description of new
FlightGoggles features, such as a photogrammetric model of the MIT Stata
Center, new rendering settings, and a Python AP
Deep Reinforcement Learning on a Budget: 3D Control and Reasoning Without a Supercomputer
An important goal of research in Deep Reinforcement Learning in mobile
robotics is to train agents capable of solving complex tasks, which require a
high level of scene understanding and reasoning from an egocentric perspective.
When trained from simulations, optimal environments should satisfy a currently
unobtainable combination of high-fidelity photographic observations, massive
amounts of different environment configurations and fast simulation speeds. In
this paper we argue that research on training agents capable of complex
reasoning can be simplified by decoupling from the requirement of high fidelity
photographic observations. We present a suite of tasks requiring complex
reasoning and exploration in continuous, partially observable 3D environments.
The objective is to provide challenging scenarios and a robust baseline agent
architecture that can be trained on mid-range consumer hardware in under 24h.
Our scenarios combine two key advantages: (i) they are based on a simple but
highly efficient 3D environment (ViZDoom) which allows high speed simulation
(12000fps); (ii) the scenarios provide the user with a range of difficulty
settings, in order to identify the limitations of current state of the art
algorithms and network architectures. We aim to increase accessibility to the
field of Deep-RL by providing baselines for challenging scenarios where new
ideas can be iterated on quickly. We argue that the community should be able to
address challenging problems in reasoning of mobile agents without the need for
a large compute infrastructure
Global Search with Bernoulli Alternation Kernel for Task-oriented Grasping Informed by Simulation
We develop an approach that benefits from large simulated datasets and takes
full advantage of the limited online data that is most relevant. We propose a
variant of Bayesian optimization that alternates between using informed and
uninformed kernels. With this Bernoulli Alternation Kernel we ensure that
discrepancies between simulation and reality do not hinder adapting robot
control policies online. The proposed approach is applied to a challenging
real-world problem of task-oriented grasping with novel objects. Our further
contribution is a neural network architecture and training pipeline that use
experience from grasping objects in simulation to learn grasp stability scores.
We learn task scores from a labeled dataset with a convolutional network, which
is used to construct an informed kernel for our variant of Bayesian
optimization. Experiments on an ABB Yumi robot with real sensor data
demonstrate success of our approach, despite the challenge of fulfilling task
requirements and high uncertainty over physical properties of objects.Comment: To appear in 2nd Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 201
- …