4 research outputs found
Hierarchical Optimization Time Integration for CFL-rate MPM Stepping
We propose Hierarchical Optimization Time Integration (HOT) for efficient
implicit time-stepping of the Material Point Method (MPM) irrespective of
simulated materials and conditions. HOT is an MPM-specialized hierarchical
optimization algorithm that solves nonlinear time step problems for large-scale
MPM systems near the CFL-limit. HOT provides convergent simulations
"out-of-the-box" across widely varying materials and computational resolutions
without parameter tuning. As an implicit MPM time stepper accelerated by a
custom-designed Galerkin multigrid wrapped in a quasi-Newton solver, HOT is
both highly parallelizable and robustly convergent. As we show in our analysis,
HOT maintains consistent and efficient performance even as we grow stiffness,
increase deformation, and vary materials over a wide range of finite strain,
elastodynamic and plastic examples. Through careful benchmark ablation studies,
we compare the effectiveness of HOT against seemingly plausible alternative
combinations of MPM with standard multigrid and other Newton-Krylov models. We
show how these alternative designs result in severe issues and poor
performance. In contrast, HOT outperforms the existing state-of-the-art,
heavily optimized implicit MPM codes with an up to 10x performance speedup
across a wide range of challenging benchmark test simulations
Soft Hybrid Aerial Vehicle via Bistable Mechanism
Unmanned aerial vehicles have been demonstrated successfully in a variety of
tasks, including surveying and sampling tasks over large areas. These vehicles
can take many forms. Quadrotors' agility and ability to hover makes them well
suited for navigating potentially tight spaces, while fixed wing aircraft are
capable of efficient flight over long distances. Hybrid aerial vehicles (HAVs)
attempt to achieve both of these benefits by exhibiting multiple modes;
however, morphing HAVs typically require extra actuators which add mass,
reducing both agility and efficiency. We propose a morphing HAV with folding
wings that exhibits both a quadrotor and a fixed wing mode without requiring
any extra actuation. This is achieved by leveraging the motion of a bistable
mechanism at the center of the aircraft to drive folding of the wing using only
the existing motors and the inertia of the system. We optimize both the
bistable mechanism and the folding wing using a topology optimization approach.
The resulting mechanisms were fabricated on a 3D printer and attached to an
existing quadrotor frame. Our prototype successfully transitions between both
modes and our experiments demonstrate that the behavior of the fabricated
prototype is consistent with that of the simulation.Comment: 7 pages, 10 figure
P-Cloth: Interactive Complex Cloth Simulation on Multi-GPU Systems using Dynamic Matrix Assembly and Pipelined Implicit Integrators
We present a novel parallel algorithm for cloth simulation that exploits
multiple GPUs for fast computation and the handling of very high resolution
meshes. To accelerate implicit integration, we describe new parallel algorithms
for sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) and for dynamic matrix assembly
on a multi-GPU workstation. Our algorithms use a novel work queue generation
scheme for a fat-tree GPU interconnect topology. Furthermore, we present a
novel collision handling scheme that uses spatial hashing for discrete and
continuous collision detection along with a non-linear impact zone solver. Our
parallel schemes can distribute the computation and storage overhead among
multiple GPUs and enable us to perform almost interactive simulation on complex
cloth meshes, which can hardly be handled on a single GPU due to memory
limitations. We have evaluated the performance with two multi-GPU workstations
(with 4 and 8 GPUs, respectively) on cloth meshes with 0.5-1.65M triangles. Our
approach can reliably handle the collisions and generate vivid wrinkles and
folds at 2-5 fps, which is significantly faster than prior cloth simulation
systems. We observe almost linear speedups with respect to the number of GPUs
Codimensional Incremental Potential Contact
We extend the incremental potential contact (IPC) model [Li et al. 2020a] for
contacting elastodynamics to resolve systems composed of arbitrary combinations
of codimensional degrees-of-freedoms. This enables a unified,
interpenetration-free, robust, and stable simulation framework that couples
codimension-0,1,2, and 3 geometries seamlessly with frictional contact.
Extending the IPC model to thin structures poses new challenges in computing
strain, modeling thickness and determining collisions. To address these
challenges we propose three corresponding contributions. First, we introduce a
C2 constitutive barrier model that directly enforces strain limiting as an
energy potential while preserving rest state. This provides energetically
consistent strain limiting models (both isotropic and anisotropic) for cloth
that enable strict satisfaction of strain-limit inequalities with direct
coupling to both elastodynamics and contact via minimization of the incremental
potential. Second, to capture the geometric thickness of codimensional domains
we extend IPC to directly enforce distance offsets. Our treatment imposes a
strict guarantee that mid-surfaces (mid-lines) of shells (rods) will not move
closer than applied thickness values, even as these thicknesses become
characteristically small. This enables us to account for thickness in the
contact behavior of codimensional structures and so robustly capture
challenging contacting geometries; a number of which, to our knowledge, have
not been simulated before. Third, codimensional models, especially with modeled
thickness, mandate strict accuracy requirements that pose a severe challenge to
all existing continuous collision detection (CCD) methods. To address these
limitations we develop a new, efficient, simple-to-implement additive CCD
(ACCD) method that iteratively refines a lower bound converging to time of
impact