Robotic manipulation of deformable rope-like objects using differentiable compliant position-based dynamics

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2023

Fei Liu, Entong Su, Jingpei Lu, Mingen Li, Michael C Yip

Publisher Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10093017/
ArXiv PDF: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.09714

Abstract: Robot manipulation of rope-like objects is an interesting problem with some critical applications, such as autonomous robotic suturing. Solving for and controlling rope is difficult due to the complexity of rope physics and the challenge of building fast and accurate models of deformable materials. While more data-driven approaches have become more popular for finding controllers that learn to do a single task, there is still a strong motivation for a model-based method that could solve many optimization problems. Towards this end, we introduced compliant position-based dynamics (XPBD) to model rope-like objects. Using geometric constraints, the model can represent the coupling of shear/stretch and bend/twist effects. Of crucial importance is that our formulation is differentiable, which can solve parameter estimation problems and improve the matching of rope physics to real-life scenarios (i.e., the real-to-sim …

Liu et al. (2023) Robotic manipulation of deformable rope-like objects using differentiable compliant position-based dynamics, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 8, no. 7, pp. 3964-3971.