Differentiable physics is a powerful approach to learning and control problems that involve physical objects and environments. While notable progress has been made, the capabilities of differentiable physics solvers remain limited. We develop a scalable framework for differentiable physics that can support a large number of objects and their interactions. To accommodate objects with arbitrary geometry and topology, we adopt meshes as our representation and leverage the sparsity of contacts for scalable differentiable collision handling. Collisions are resolved in localized regions to minimize the number of optimization variables even when the number of simulated objects is high. We further accelerate implicit differentiation of optimization with nonlinear constraints. Experiments demonstrate that the presented framework requires up to two orders of magnitude less memory and computation in comparison to recent particle-based methods. We further validate the approach on inverse problems and control scenarios, where it outperforms derivative-free and model-free baselines by at least an order of magnitude.

本文介绍了一种可扩展的基于 mesh 的 Differentiable physics 求解器，能够支持大量物体及其交互，并通过稀疏的碰撞处理加速碰撞检测求解。通过实验证明，该框架相比最新的粒子法方法，需要的内存和计算资源少两个数量级，并在控制应用场景中表现优异。

可扩展的可微物理学习和控制