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arXiv · 2302.03231

Optimal Control of Granular Material

Yuichiro Aoyama·Amin Haeri·Evangelos A. Theodorou
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Abstract

The control of granular materials, showing up in many industrial applications, is a challenging open research problem. Granular material systems are complex-behavior (as they could have solid-, fluid-, and gas-like behaviors) and high-dimensional (as they could have many grains/particles with at least 3 DOF in 3D) systems. Recently, a machine learning-based Graph Neural Network (GNN) simulator has been proposed to learn the underlying dynamics. In this paper, we perform an optimal control of a rigid body-driven granular material system whose dynamics is learned by a GNN model trained by reduced data generated via a physics-based simulator and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). We use Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) to obtain the optimal control commands that can form granular particles into a target shape. The model and results are shown to be relatively fast and accurate. The control commands are also applied to the ground-truth model,(i.e., physics-based simulator) to further validate the approach.

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Yuichiro Aoyama, Amin Haeri, Evangelos A. Theodorou. 2023-02-07. Optimal Control of Granular Material. https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.03231

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