Cloth simulation has wide applications in computer animation, garment design,
and robot-assisted dressing. This work presents a differentiable cloth
simulator whose additional gradient information facilitates cloth-related
applications. Our differentiable simulator extends a state-of-the-art cloth
simulator based on Projective Dynamics (PD) and with dry frictional contact. We
draw inspiration from previous work to propose a fast and novel method for
deriving gradients in PD-based cloth simulation with dry frictional contact.
Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of the
usefulness of gradients in contact-rich cloth simulation. Finally, we
demonstrate the efficacy of our simulator in a number of downstream
applications, including system identification, trajectory optimization for
assisted dressing, closed-loop control, inverse design, and real-to-sim
transfer. We observe a substantial speedup obtained from using our gradient
information in solving most of these applications
