Fast, accurate, and generalizable simulations are a key enabler of modern advances in robot design and control. However, existing simulation frameworks in robotics either model rigid environments and mechanisms only, or if they include flexible or soft structures, suffer significantly in one or more of these performance areas. To close this "sim2real" gap, we introduce DisMech, a simulation environment that models highly dynamic motions of rod-like soft continuum robots and structures, quickly and accurately, with arbitrary connections between them. Our methodology combines a fully implicit discrete differential geometry-based physics solver with fast and accurate contact handling, all in an intuitive software interface. Crucially, we propose a gradient descent approach to easily map the motions of hardware robot prototypes to control inputs in DisMech. We validate DisMech through several highly-nuanced soft robot simulations while demonstrating an order of magnitude speed increase over previous state of the art. Our real2sim validation shows high physical accuracy versus hardware, even with complicated soft actuation mechanisms such as shape memory alloy wires. With its low computational cost, physical accuracy, and ease of use, DisMech can accelerate translation of sim-based control for both soft robotics and deformable object manipulation.

翻译：摘要：快速、精确且具泛化能力的仿真是现代机器人设计与控制进步的关键推动因素。然而，现有机器人学仿真框架要么仅能建模刚性环境与机构，要么在包含柔性或软体结构时，在这些性能维度上显著不足。为弥合这一“仿真到现实”的鸿沟，我们提出DisMech——一个能够快速且精确地模拟杆状软体连续体机器人及其结构高动态运动的仿真环境，支持任意连接结构。该方法将基于离散微分几何的全隐式物理求解器与快速精确的接触处理相结合，并集成于直观的软件界面中。关键的是，我们提出一种梯度下降方法，可便捷地将硬件机器人原型的运动映射为DisMech中的控制输入。通过多个高度精微的软体机器人仿真，我们验证了DisMech的性能，同时展现出相比先前最先进方法一个数量级的速度提升。我们的真实到仿真验证表明，即使面对形状记忆合金丝等复杂软体驱动机制，其物理精度仍与硬件高度一致。凭借低计算成本、物理精度与易用性，DisMech可加速基于仿真的控制策略向软体机器人及可变形物体操作领域的转化。