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arXiv · 2512.13214

Differentiable Material Point Method for the Control of Deformable Objects

Diego Bolliger·Gabriele Fadini·Markus Bambach·Alisa Rupenyan
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Abstract

Controlling the deformation of flexible objects is challenging due to their non-linear dynamics and high-dimensional configuration space. This work presents a differentiable Material Point Method (MPM) simulator targeted at control applications. We exploit the differentiability of the simulator to optimize a control trajectory in an active damping problem for a hyperelastic rope. The simulator effectively minimizes the kinetic energy of the rope around 2$\times$ faster than a baseline MPPI method and to a 20% lower energy level, while using about 3% of the computation time.

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Diego Bolliger, Gabriele Fadini, Markus Bambach, Alisa Rupenyan. 2025-12-15. Differentiable Material Point Method for the Control of Deformable Objects. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13214

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