arXiv subjects

Miles Macklin

Publications and source records attributed to Miles Macklin.

22 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

VIPER: Volume Invariant Position-based Elastic Rods

We extend the formulation of position-based rods to include elastic volumetric deformations. We achieve this by introducing an additional degree of freedom per vertex -- isotropic scale (and its velocity). Including scale enriches the space of possible deformations, allowing the simulation of volumetric effects, such as a reduction in cross-sectional area when a rod is stretched. We rigorously derive the continuous formulation of its elastic energy potentials, and hence its associated position-based dynamics (PBD) updates to realize this model, enabling the simulation of up to 26000 DOFs at 140 Hz in our GPU implementation. We further show how rods can provide a compact alternative to tetrahedral meshes for the representation of complex muscle deformations, as well as providing a convenient representation for collision detection. This is achieved by modeling a muscle as a bundle of rods, for which we also introduce a technique to automatically convert a muscle surface mesh into a rods-bundle. Finally, we show how rods and/or bundles can be skinned to a surface mesh to drive its deformation, resulting in an alternative to cages for real-time volumetric deformation.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2019

A Validated Physical Model For Real-Time Simulation of Soft Robotic Snakes

In this work we present a framework that is capable of accurately representing soft robotic actuators in a multiphysics environment in real-time. We propose a constraint-based dynamics model of a 1-dimensional pneumatic soft actuator that accounts for internal pressure forces, as well as the effect of actuator latency and damping under inflation and deflation and demonstrate its accuracy a full soft robotic snake with the composition of multiple 1D actuators. We verify our model's accuracy in static deformation and dynamic locomotion open-loop control experiments. To achieve real-time performance we leverage the parallel computation power of GPUs to allow interactive control and feedback.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2019

Closing the Sim-to-Real Loop: Adapting Simulation Randomization with Real World Experience

We consider the problem of transferring policies to the real world by training on a distribution of simulated scenarios. Rather than manually tuning the randomization of simulations, we adapt the simulation parameter distribution using a few real world roll-outs interleaved with policy training. In doing so, we are able to change the distribution of simulations to improve the policy transfer by matching the policy behavior in simulation and the real world. We show that policies trained with our method are able to reliably transfer to different robots in two real world tasks: swing-peg-in-hole and opening a cabinet drawer. The video of our experiments can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/simopt

cs.RO↗

arXiv2018

GPU-Accelerated Robotic Simulation for Distributed Reinforcement Learning

Most Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) algorithms require a prohibitively large number of training samples for learning complex tasks. Many recent works on speeding up Deep RL have focused on distributed training and simulation. While distributed training is often done on the GPU, simulation is not. In this work, we propose using GPU-accelerated RL simulations as an alternative to CPU ones. Using NVIDIA Flex, a GPU-based physics engine, we show promising speed-ups of learning various continuous-control, locomotion tasks. With one GPU and CPU core, we are able to train the Humanoid running task in less than 20 minutes, using 10-1000x fewer CPU cores than previous works. We also demonstrate the scalability of our simulator to multi-GPU settings to train more challenging locomotion tasks.

cs.RO↗