Jade: A Differentiable Physics Engine for Articulated Rigid Bodies with Intersection-Free Frictional Contact

TL;DR

Jade is a novel differentiable physics engine that accurately models articulated rigid bodies with intersection-free collision detection and stable frictional contact solutions, enabling advanced simulation and optimization tasks.

Contribution

Jade introduces a differentiable physics engine with intersection-free collision handling and stable frictional contact solutions, improving simulation accuracy and stability for contact-rich scenarios.

Findings

Effective in contact-rich tasks

Ensures intersection-free collision simulation

Provides stable solutions for multiple frictional contacts

Abstract

We present Jade, a differentiable physics engine for articulated rigid bodies. Jade models contacts as the Linear Complementarity Problem (LCP). Compared to existing differentiable simulations, Jade offers features including intersection-free collision simulation and stable LCP solutions for multiple frictional contacts. We use continuous collision detection to detect the time of impact and adopt the backtracking strategy to prevent intersection between bodies with complex geometry shapes. We derive the gradient calculation to ensure the whole simulation process is differentiable under the backtracking mechanism. We modify the popular Dantzig algorithm to get valid solutions under multiple frictional contacts. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our differentiable physics simulation over a variety of contact-rich tasks.