Differentiable Material Point Method for the Control of Deformable Objects

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.