arXiv subjects

Eric Heiden

Publications and source records attributed to Eric Heiden.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Isaac Lab: A GPU-Accelerated Simulation Framework for Multi-Modal Robot Learning

We present Isaac Lab, the natural successor to Isaac Gym, which extends the paradigm of GPU-native robotics simulation into the era of large-scale multi-modal learning. Isaac Lab combines high-fidelity GPU parallel physics, photorealistic rendering, and a modular, composable architecture for designing environments and training robot policies. Beyond physics and rendering, the framework integrates actuator models, multi-frequency sensor simulation, data collection pipelines, and domain randomization tools, unifying best practices for reinforcement and imitation learning at scale within a single extensible platform. We highlight its application to a diverse set of challenges, including whole-body control, cross-embodiment mobility, contact-rich and dexterous manipulation, and the integration of human demonstrations for skill acquisition. Finally, we discuss upcoming integration with the differentiable, GPU-accelerated Newton physics engine, which promises new opportunities for scalable, data-efficient, and gradient-based approaches to robot learning. We believe Isaac Lab's combination of advanced simulation capabilities, rich sensing, and data-center scale execution will help unlock the next generation of breakthroughs in robotics research.

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arXiv2025

The Reality Gap in Robotics: Challenges, Solutions, and Best Practices

Machine learning has facilitated significant advancements across various robotics domains, including navigation, locomotion, and manipulation. Many such achievements have been driven by the extensive use of simulation as a critical tool for training and testing robotic systems prior to their deployment in real-world environments. However, simulations consist of abstractions and approximations that inevitably introduce discrepancies between simulated and real environments, known as the reality gap. These discrepancies significantly hinder the successful transfer of systems from simulation to the real world. Closing this gap remains one of the most pressing challenges in robotics. Recent advances in sim-to-real transfer have demonstrated promising results across various platforms, including locomotion, navigation, and manipulation. By leveraging techniques such as domain randomization, real-to-sim transfer, state and action abstractions, and sim-real co-training, many works have overcome the reality gap. However, challenges persist, and a deeper understanding of the reality gap's root causes and solutions is necessary. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of the sim-to-real landscape, highlighting the causes, solutions, and evaluation metrics for the reality gap and sim-to-real transfer.

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arXiv2025

TopoCut: Learning Multi-Step Cutting with Spectral Rewards and Discrete Diffusion Policies

Robotic manipulation tasks involving cutting deformable objects remain challenging due to complex topological behaviors, difficulties in perceiving dense object states, and the lack of efficient evaluation methods for cutting outcomes. In this paper, we introduce TopoCut, a comprehensive benchmark for multi-step robotic cutting tasks that integrates a cutting environment and generalized policy learning. TopoCut is built upon three core components: (1) We introduce a high-fidelity simulation environment based on a particle-based elastoplastic solver with compliant von Mises constitutive models, augmented by a novel damage-driven topology discovery mechanism that enables accurate tracking of multiple cutting pieces. (2) We develop a comprehensive reward design that integrates the topology discovery with a pose-invariant spectral reward model based on Laplace-Beltrami eigenanalysis, facilitating consistent and robust assessment of cutting quality. (3) We propose an integrated policy learning pipeline, where a dynamics-informed perception module predicts topological evolution and produces particle-wise, topology-aware embeddings to support PDDP (Particle-based Score-Entropy Discrete Diffusion Policy) for goal-conditioned policy learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TopoCut supports trajectory generation, scalable learning, precise evaluation, and strong generalization across diverse object geometries, scales, poses, and cutting goals.

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arXiv2025

Neural Robot Dynamics

Accurate and efficient simulation of modern robots remains challenging due to their high degrees of freedom and intricate mechanisms. Neural simulators have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional analytical simulators, capable of efficiently predicting complex dynamics and adapting to real-world data; however, existing neural simulators typically require application-specific training and fail to generalize to novel tasks and/or environments, primarily due to inadequate representations of the global state. In this work, we address the problem of learning generalizable neural simulators for robots that are structured as articulated rigid bodies. We propose NeRD (Neural Robot Dynamics), learned robot-specific dynamics models for predicting future states for articulated rigid bodies under contact constraints. NeRD uniquely replaces the low-level dynamics and contact solvers in an analytical simulator and employs a robot-centric and spatially-invariant simulation state representation. We integrate the learned NeRD models as an interchangeable backend solver within a state-of-the-art robotics simulator. We conduct extensive experiments to show that the NeRD simulators are stable and accurate over a thousand simulation steps; generalize across tasks and environment configurations; enable policy learning exclusively in a neural engine; and, unlike most classical simulators, can be fine-tuned from real-world data to bridge the gap between simulation and reality.

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arXiv2024

Adaptive Horizon Actor-Critic for Policy Learning in Contact-Rich Differentiable Simulation

Model-Free Reinforcement Learning (MFRL), leveraging the policy gradient theorem, has demonstrated considerable success in continuous control tasks. However, these approaches are plagued by high gradient variance due to zeroth-order gradient estimation, resulting in suboptimal policies. Conversely, First-Order Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (FO-MBRL) methods employing differentiable simulation provide gradients with reduced variance but are susceptible to sampling error in scenarios involving stiff dynamics, such as physical contact. This paper investigates the source of this error and introduces Adaptive Horizon Actor-Critic (AHAC), an FO-MBRL algorithm that reduces gradient error by adapting the model-based horizon to avoid stiff dynamics. Empirical findings reveal that AHAC outperforms MFRL baselines, attaining 40% more reward across a set of locomotion tasks and efficiently scaling to high-dimensional control environments with improved wall-clock-time efficiency.

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arXiv2023

HandyPriors: Physically Consistent Perception of Hand-Object Interactions with Differentiable Priors

Various heuristic objectives for modeling hand-object interaction have been proposed in past work. However, due to the lack of a cohesive framework, these objectives often possess a narrow scope of applicability and are limited by their efficiency or accuracy. In this paper, we propose HandyPriors, a unified and general pipeline for pose estimation in human-object interaction scenes by leveraging recent advances in differentiable physics and rendering. Our approach employs rendering priors to align with input images and segmentation masks along with physics priors to mitigate penetration and relative-sliding across frames. Furthermore, we present two alternatives for hand and object pose estimation. The optimization-based pose estimation achieves higher accuracy, while the filtering-based tracking, which utilizes the differentiable priors as dynamics and observation models, executes faster. We demonstrate that HandyPriors attains comparable or superior results in the pose estimation task, and that the differentiable physics module can predict contact information for pose refinement. We also show that our approach generalizes to perception tasks, including robotic hand manipulation and human-object pose estimation in the wild.

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arXiv2023

STAMP: Differentiable Task and Motion Planning via Stein Variational Gradient Descent

Planning for sequential robotics tasks often requires integrated symbolic and geometric reasoning. TAMP algorithms typically solve these problems by performing a tree search over high-level task sequences while checking for kinematic and dynamic feasibility. This can be inefficient because, typically, candidate task plans resulting from the tree search ignore geometric information. This often leads to motion planning failures that require expensive backtracking steps to find alternative task plans. We propose a novel approach to TAMP called Stein Task and Motion Planning (STAMP) that relaxes the hybrid optimization problem into a continuous domain. This allows us to leverage gradients from differentiable physics simulation to fully optimize discrete and continuous plan parameters for TAMP. In particular, we solve the optimization problem using a gradient-based variational inference algorithm called Stein Variational Gradient Descent. This allows us to find a distribution of solutions within a single optimization run. Furthermore, we use an off-the-shelf differentiable physics simulator that is parallelized on the GPU to run parallelized inference over diverse plan parameters. We demonstrate our method on a variety of problems and show that it can find multiple diverse plans in a single optimization run while also being significantly faster than existing approaches.

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arXiv2023

Fast-Grasp'D: Dexterous Multi-finger Grasp Generation Through Differentiable Simulation

Multi-finger grasping relies on high quality training data, which is hard to obtain: human data is hard to transfer and synthetic data relies on simplifying assumptions that reduce grasp quality. By making grasp simulation differentiable, and contact dynamics amenable to gradient-based optimization, we accelerate the search for high-quality grasps with fewer limiting assumptions. We present Grasp'D-1M: a large-scale dataset for multi-finger robotic grasping, synthesized with Fast- Grasp'D, a novel differentiable grasping simulator. Grasp'D- 1M contains one million training examples for three robotic hands (three, four and five-fingered), each with multimodal visual inputs (RGB+depth+segmentation, available in mono and stereo). Grasp synthesis with Fast-Grasp'D is 10x faster than GraspIt! and 20x faster than the prior Grasp'D differentiable simulator. Generated grasps are more stable and contact-rich than GraspIt! grasps, regardless of the distance threshold used for contact generation. We validate the usefulness of our dataset by retraining an existing vision-based grasping pipeline on Grasp'D-1M, and showing a dramatic increase in model performance, predicting grasps with 30% more contact, a 33% higher epsilon metric, and 35% lower simulated displacement. Additional details at https://dexgrasp.github.io.

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arXiv2022

Grasp'D: Differentiable Contact-rich Grasp Synthesis for Multi-fingered Hands

The study of hand-object interaction requires generating viable grasp poses for high-dimensional multi-finger models, often relying on analytic grasp synthesis which tends to produce brittle and unnatural results. This paper presents Grasp'D, an approach for grasp synthesis with a differentiable contact simulation from both known models as well as visual inputs. We use gradient-based methods as an alternative to sampling-based grasp synthesis, which fails without simplifying assumptions, such as pre-specified contact locations and eigengrasps. Such assumptions limit grasp discovery and, in particular, exclude high-contact power grasps. In contrast, our simulation-based approach allows for stable, efficient, physically realistic, high-contact grasp synthesis, even for gripper morphologies with high-degrees of freedom. We identify and address challenges in making grasp simulation amenable to gradient-based optimization, such as non-smooth object surface geometry, contact sparsity, and a rugged optimization landscape. Grasp'D compares favorably to analytic grasp synthesis on human and robotic hand models, and resultant grasps achieve over 4x denser contact, leading to significantly higher grasp stability. Video and code available at https://graspd-eccv22.github.io/.

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arXiv2022

Inferring Articulated Rigid Body Dynamics from RGBD Video

Being able to reproduce physical phenomena ranging from light interaction to contact mechanics, simulators are becoming increasingly useful in more and more application domains where real-world interaction or labeled data are difficult to obtain. Despite recent progress, significant human effort is needed to configure simulators to accurately reproduce real-world behavior. We introduce a pipeline that combines inverse rendering with differentiable simulation to create digital twins of real-world articulated mechanisms from depth or RGB videos. Our approach automatically discovers joint types and estimates their kinematic parameters, while the dynamic properties of the overall mechanism are tuned to attain physically accurate simulations. Control policies optimized in our derived simulation transfer successfully back to the original system, as we demonstrate on a simulated system. Further, our approach accurately reconstructs the kinematic tree of an articulated mechanism being manipulated by a robot, and highly nonlinear dynamics of a real-world coupled pendulum mechanism. Website: https://eric-heiden.github.io/video2sim

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arXiv2022

DiSECt: A Differentiable Simulator for Parameter Inference and Control in Robotic Cutting

Robotic cutting of soft materials is critical for applications such as food processing, household automation, and surgical manipulation. As in other areas of robotics, simulators can facilitate controller verification, policy learning, and dataset generation. Moreover, differentiable simulators can enable gradient-based optimization, which is invaluable for calibrating simulation parameters and optimizing controllers. In this work, we present DiSECt: the first differentiable simulator for cutting soft materials. The simulator augments the finite element method (FEM) with a continuous contact model based on signed distance fields (SDF), as well as a continuous damage model that inserts springs on opposite sides of the cutting plane and allows them to weaken until zero stiffness, enabling crack formation. Through various experiments, we evaluate the performance of the simulator. We first show that the simulator can be calibrated to match resultant forces and deformation fields from a state-of-the-art commercial solver and real-world cutting datasets, with generality across cutting velocities and object instances. We then show that Bayesian inference can be performed efficiently by leveraging the differentiability of the simulator, estimating posteriors over hundreds of parameters in a fraction of the time of derivative-free methods. Next, we illustrate that control parameters in the simulation can be optimized to minimize cutting forces via lateral slicing motions. Finally, we conduct experiments on a real robot arm equipped with a slicing knife to infer simulation parameters from force measurements. By optimizing the slicing motion of the knife, we show on fruit cutting scenarios that the average knife force can be reduced by more than 40% compared to a vertical cutting motion. We publish code and additional materials on our project website at https://diff-cutting-sim.github.io.

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arXiv2021

Probabilistic Inference of Simulation Parameters via Parallel Differentiable Simulation

To accurately reproduce measurements from the real world, simulators need to have an adequate model of the physical system and require the parameters of the model be identified. We address the latter problem of estimating parameters through a Bayesian inference approach that approximates a posterior distribution over simulation parameters given real sensor measurements. By extending the commonly used Gaussian likelihood model for trajectories via the multiple-shooting formulation, our chosen particle-based inference algorithm Stein Variational Gradient Descent is able to identify highly nonlinear, underactuated systems. We leverage GPU code generation and differentiable simulation to evaluate the likelihood and its gradient for many particles in parallel. Our algorithm infers non-parametric distributions over simulation parameters more accurately than comparable baselines and handles constraints over parameters efficiently through gradient-based optimization. We evaluate estimation performance on several physical experiments. On an underactuated mechanism where a 7-DOF robot arm excites an object with an unknown mass configuration, we demonstrate how our inference technique can identify symmetries between the parameters and provide highly accurate predictions. Project website: https://uscresl.github.io/prob-diff-sim

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arXiv2021

DiSECt: A Differentiable Simulation Engine for Autonomous Robotic Cutting

Robotic cutting of soft materials is critical for applications such as food processing, household automation, and surgical manipulation. As in other areas of robotics, simulators can facilitate controller verification, policy learning, and dataset generation. Moreover, differentiable simulators can enable gradient-based optimization, which is invaluable for calibrating simulation parameters and optimizing controllers. In this work, we present DiSECt: the first differentiable simulator for cutting soft materials. The simulator augments the finite element method (FEM) with a continuous contact model based on signed distance fields (SDF), as well as a continuous damage model that inserts springs on opposite sides of the cutting plane and allows them to weaken until zero stiffness, enabling crack formation. Through various experiments, we evaluate the performance of the simulator. We first show that the simulator can be calibrated to match resultant forces and deformation fields from a state-of-the-art commercial solver and real-world cutting datasets, with generality across cutting velocities and object instances. We then show that Bayesian inference can be performed efficiently by leveraging the differentiability of the simulator, estimating posteriors over hundreds of parameters in a fraction of the time of derivative-free methods. Finally, we illustrate that control parameters in the simulation can be optimized to minimize cutting forces via lateral slicing motions. We publish videos and additional results on our project website at https://diff-cutting-sim.github.io.

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arXiv2021

NeBula: Quest for Robotic Autonomy in Challenging Environments; TEAM CoSTAR at the DARPA Subterranean Challenge

This paper presents and discusses algorithms, hardware, and software architecture developed by the TEAM CoSTAR (Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots), competing in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Specifically, it presents the techniques utilized within the Tunnel (2019) and Urban (2020) competitions, where CoSTAR achieved 2nd and 1st place, respectively. We also discuss CoSTAR's demonstrations in Martian-analog surface and subsurface (lava tubes) exploration. The paper introduces our autonomy solution, referred to as NeBula (Networked Belief-aware Perceptual Autonomy). NeBula is an uncertainty-aware framework that aims at enabling resilient and modular autonomy solutions by performing reasoning and decision making in the belief space (space of probability distributions over the robot and world states). We discuss various components of the NeBula framework, including: (i) geometric and semantic environment mapping; (ii) a multi-modal positioning system; (iii) traversability analysis and local planning; (iv) global motion planning and exploration behavior; (i) risk-aware mission planning; (vi) networking and decentralized reasoning; and (vii) learning-enabled adaptation. We discuss the performance of NeBula on several robot types (e.g. wheeled, legged, flying), in various environments. We discuss the specific results and lessons learned from fielding this solution in the challenging courses of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge competition.

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arXiv2020

NeuralSim: Augmenting Differentiable Simulators with Neural Networks

Differentiable simulators provide an avenue for closing the sim-to-real gap by enabling the use of efficient, gradient-based optimization algorithms to find the simulation parameters that best fit the observed sensor readings. Nonetheless, these analytical models can only predict the dynamical behavior of systems for which they have been designed. In this work, we study the augmentation of a novel differentiable rigid-body physics engine via neural networks that is able to learn nonlinear relationships between dynamic quantities and can thus learn effects not accounted for in traditional simulators.Such augmentations require less data to train and generalize better compared to entirely data-driven models. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the ability of our hybrid simulator to learn complex dynamics involving frictional contacts from real data, as well as match known models of viscous friction, and present an approach for automatically discovering useful augmentations. We show that, besides benefiting dynamics modeling, inserting neural networks can accelerate model-based control architectures. We observe a ten-fold speed-up when replacing the QP solver inside a model-predictive gait controller for quadruped robots with a neural network, allowing us to significantly improve control delays as we demonstrate in real-hardware experiments. We publish code, additional results and videos from our experiments on our project webpage at https://sites.google.com/usc.edu/neuralsim.

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arXiv2020

Augmenting Differentiable Simulators with Neural Networks to Close the Sim2Real Gap

We present a differentiable simulation architecture for articulated rigid-body dynamics that enables the augmentation of analytical models with neural networks at any point of the computation. Through gradient-based optimization, identification of the simulation parameters and network weights is performed efficiently in preliminary experiments on a real-world dataset and in sim2sim transfer applications, while poor local optima are overcome through a random search approach.

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arXiv2020

Confidence-rich grid mapping

Representing the environment is a fundamental task in enabling robots to act autonomously in unknown environments. In this work, we present confidence-rich mapping (CRM), a new algorithm for spatial grid-based mapping of the 3D environment. CRM augments the occupancy level at each voxel by its confidence value. By explicitly storing and evolving confidence values using the CRM filter, CRM extends traditional grid mapping in three ways: first, it partially maintains the probabilistic dependence among voxels. Second, it relaxes the need for hand-engineering an inverse sensor model and proposes the concept of sensor cause model that can be derived in a principled manner from the forward sensor model. Third, and most importantly, it provides consistent confidence values over the occupancy estimation that can be reliably used in collision risk evaluation and motion planning. CRM runs online and enables mapping environments where voxels might be partially occupied. We demonstrate the performance of the method on various datasets and environments in simulation and on physical systems. We show in real-world experiments that, in addition to achieving maps that are more accurate than traditional methods, the proposed filtering scheme demonstrates a much higher level of consistency between its error and the reported confidence, hence, enabling a more reliable collision risk evaluation for motion planning.

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arXiv2020

Experimental Comparison of Global Motion Planning Algorithms for Wheeled Mobile Robots

Planning smooth and energy-efficient motions for wheeled mobile robots is a central task for applications ranging from autonomous driving to service and intralogistic robotics. Over the past decades, a wide variety of motion planners, steer functions and path-improvement techniques have been proposed for such non-holonomic systems. With the objective of comparing this large assortment of state-of-the-art motion-planning techniques, we introduce a novel open-source motion-planning benchmark for wheeled mobile robots, whose scenarios resemble real-world applications (such as navigating warehouses, moving in cluttered cities or parking), and propose metrics for planning efficiency and path quality. Our benchmark is easy to use and extend, and thus allows practitioners and researchers to evaluate new motion-planning algorithms, scenarios and metrics easily. We use our benchmark to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of several common state-of-the-art motion planners and provide recommendations on when they should be used.

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