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.

翻译：由于柔性物体具有非线性动力学特性和高维构型空间，控制其形变是一项具有挑战性的任务。本研究提出了一种面向控制应用的可微分物质点法（MPM）模拟器。我们利用该模拟器的可微分特性，针对超弹性绳索的主动阻尼问题优化控制轨迹。该模拟器能有效降低绳索的动能，其收敛速度比基准MPPI方法快约2倍，最终动能水平降低20%，且计算时间仅需约3%。