用隐式时间步加速软体机器人控制学习,速度快40倍且不损失精度。
Rapidly Learning Soft Robot Control via Implicit Time-Stepping
- 采用隐式时间步模拟,提升软体机器人仿真效率
- 500环境并行时,无接触场景快6倍,含接触场景快40倍
- 新控制方法让软体机器人学习更直观,适合快速实验设计
随着刚体模拟器的快速发展,基于仿真的策略学习已成为刚性结构机器人的标准方法。相比之下,软体机器人仿真框架仍稀缺,且极少被社区采用。这主要源于缺乏易用的通用框架,以及精确模拟连续介质力学带来的高计算成本,常使策略学习难以实现。本文证明,通过隐式时间步,软体机器人策略学习可实现快速推进。所用模拟器DisMech是通用、全隐式的软体模拟器,支持软体动力学与摩擦接触。我们提出增量自然曲率控制,类比刚体机械臂的增量关节位置控制,为软体机器人学习提供直观高效的控制方式。在四个不同软体机械臂任务中,与最广泛使用的Elastica框架进行对比:使用隐式时间步,500个环境并行时,非接触场景速度提升至6倍,接触丰富场景达40倍。此外,跨模拟器的训练-评估测试(sim-to-sim gap)表明,隐式时间步在获得巨大提速的同时,未牺牲准确性,堪称罕见的‘免费午餐’。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
With the explosive growth of rigid-body simulators, policy learning in simulation has become the de facto standard for most rigid morphologies. In contrast, soft robotic simulation frameworks remain scarce and are seldom adopted by the soft robotics community. This gap stems partly from the lack of easy-to-use, general-purpose frameworks and partly from the high computational cost of accurately simulating continuum mechanics, which often renders policy learning infeasible. In this work, we demonstrate that rapid soft robot policy learning is indeed achievable via implicit time-stepping. Our simulator of choice, DisMech, is a general-purpose, fully implicit soft-body simulator capable of handling both soft dynamics and frictional contact. We further introduce delta natural curvature control, a method analogous to delta joint position control in rigid manipulators, providing an intuitive and effective means of enacting control for soft robot learning. To highlight the benefits of implicit time-stepping and delta curvature control, we conduct extensive comparisons across four diverse soft manipulator tasks against one of the most widely used soft-body frameworks, Elastica. With implicit time-stepping, parallel stepping of 500 environments achieves up to 6x faster speeds for non-contact cases and up to 40x faster for contact-rich scenarios. Finally, a comprehensive sim-to-sim gap evaluation--training policies in one simulator and evaluating them in another--demonstrates that implicit time-stepping provides a rare free lunch: dramatic speedups achieved without sacrificing accuracy.
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