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PlasticineLab: A Soft-Body Manipulation Benchmark with Differentiable Physics

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arxiv 2104.03311 v1 pith:RK25724U submitted 2021-04-07 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CVcs.GRcs.RO

PlasticineLab: A Soft-Body Manipulation Benchmark with Differentiable Physics

classification cs.LG cs.AIcs.CVcs.GRcs.RO
keywords physicsdifferentiabletasksbenchmarklearningalgorithmsapproachesbody
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Simulated virtual environments serve as one of the main driving forces behind developing and evaluating skill learning algorithms. However, existing environments typically only simulate rigid body physics. Additionally, the simulation process usually does not provide gradients that might be useful for planning and control optimizations. We introduce a new differentiable physics benchmark called PasticineLab, which includes a diverse collection of soft body manipulation tasks. In each task, the agent uses manipulators to deform the plasticine into the desired configuration. The underlying physics engine supports differentiable elastic and plastic deformation using the DiffTaichi system, posing many under-explored challenges to robotic agents. We evaluate several existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods and gradient-based methods on this benchmark. Experimental results suggest that 1) RL-based approaches struggle to solve most of the tasks efficiently; 2) gradient-based approaches, by optimizing open-loop control sequences with the built-in differentiable physics engine, can rapidly find a solution within tens of iterations, but still fall short on multi-stage tasks that require long-term planning. We expect that PlasticineLab will encourage the development of novel algorithms that combine differentiable physics and RL for more complex physics-based skill learning tasks.

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Cited by 13 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    Physics-guided residual dynamics, a spring-mass simulator plus a network that predicts velocity corrections, yields the most accurate deformable-object simulation in the paper's real-world tests.

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    cs.RO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Success-only metrics overstate deformable-manipulation performance; tactile sensing raises Safety Success (e.g. 21.4%→35.6% on Object-Soft) while Goal Success stays comparable.

  3. $\Delta$ynamics: Language-Based Representation for Inferring Rigid-Body Dynamics From Videos

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    Neural Control uses adjoint differentiation of equilibrium conditions to compute trajectory-dependent proxy gradients for history-dependent implicit models in deformable object manipulation.

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