Intersection-free Robot Manipulation with Soft-Rigid Coupled Incremental Potential Contact

• Main Authors: Du, Wenxin, Yao, Siqiong, Wang, Xinlei, Xu, Yuhang, Xu, Wenqiang, Lu, Cewu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 10-11-2023
• Subjects: Computer Science - Robotics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2311.05945

This paper presents a novel simulation platform, ZeMa, designed for robotic
manipulation tasks concerning soft objects. Such simulation ideally requires
three properties: two-way soft-rigid coupling, intersection-free guarantees,
and frictional contact modeling, with acceptable runtime suitable for deep and
reinforcement learning tasks. Current simulators often satisfy only a subset of
these needs, primarily focusing on distinct rigid-rigid or soft-soft
interactions. The proposed ZeMa prioritizes physical accuracy and integrates
the incremental potential contact method, offering unified dynamics simulation
for both soft and rigid objects. It efficiently manages soft-rigid contact,
operating 75x faster than baseline tools with similar methodologies like
IPC-GraspSim. To demonstrate its applicability, we employ it for parallel grasp
generation, penetrated grasp repair, and reinforcement learning for grasping,
successfully transferring the trained RL policy to real-world scenarios.