DiffAqua
Abstract
The computational design of soft underwater swimmers is challenging because of the high degrees of freedom in soft-body modeling. In this paper, we present a differentiable pipeline for co-designing a soft swimmer's geometry and controller. Our pipeline unlocks gradient-based algorithms for discovering novel swimmer designs more efficiently than traditional gradient-free solutions. We propose Wasserstein barycenters as a basis for the geometric design of soft underwater swimmers since it is differentiable and can naturally interpolate between bio-inspired base shapes via optimal transport. By combining this design space with differentiable simulation and control, we can efficiently optimize a soft underwater swimmer's performance with fewer simulations than baseline methods. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on various design problems such as fast, stable, and energy-efficient swimming and demonstrate applicability to multi-objective design.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jul 19, 2021
- Source ID
- 10.1145/3450626.3459832
Entities
People
- Andrew Spielberg
- John Z. Zhang
- Kui Wu
- Pingchuan Ma
- Robert K. Katzschmann
- Tao Du
- Wojciech Matusik
Organizations
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- ETH Zurich
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology