DiffAqua: A Differentiable Computational Design Pipeline for Soft Underwater Swimmers with Shape Interpolation
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Date
2021-08
Publication Type
Journal Article
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yes
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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.
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published
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Journal / series
Volume
40 (4)
Pages / Article No.
132
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
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Edition / version
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Software
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Subject
Computational design; differentiable simulation; optimal transport; geometry and control co-design; multi-objective optimization
Organisational unit
09689 - Katzschmann, Robert / Katzschmann, Robert
09689 - Katzschmann, Robert / Katzschmann, Robert
09689 - Katzschmann, Robert / Katzschmann, Robert