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：快速、精确且可泛化的仿真是现代机器人设计与控制领域取得进展的关键推动因素。然而，现有机器人仿真框架要么仅模拟刚性环境或机构，要么在包含柔性或软体结构时，在上述性能方面存在显著欠缺。为弥合这一“仿真-现实”差距，我们提出DisMech——一种能够快速、精确地模拟杆状软体连续体机器人及结构高度动态运动，并支持任意连接关系的仿真环境。我们的方法将完全隐式离散微分几何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。关键创新在于，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。我们通过多项精细化的软体机器人仿真对DisMech进行验证，同时证明其速度较先前最优方法提升一个数量级。我们的“现实-仿真”验证表明，即便针对形状记忆合金丝等复杂软体驱动机构，DisMech仍能与硬件保持高物理精度。凭借低计算成本、高物理精度及易用性，DisMech能够加速基于仿真的控制策略在软体机器人及可变形物体操作领域的转化应用。