Sampling-based Model Predictive Control Leveraging Parallelizable Physics Simulations

We present a method for sampling-based model predictive control that makes use of a generic physics simulator as the dynamical model. In particular, we propose a Model Predictive Path Integral controller (MPPI), that uses the GPU-parallelizable IsaacGym simulator to compute the forward dynamics of a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Pezzato, Corrado, Salmi, Chadi, Spahn, Max, Trevisan, Elia, Alonso-Mora, Javier, Carlos Hernandez Corbato
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 04.12.2023
Subjects
Collision avoidance
Dynamic models
Motion planning
Navigation
Predictive control
Robot dynamics
Sampling
Simulation
Task complexity
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Summary:We present a method for sampling-based model predictive control that makes use of a generic physics simulator as the dynamical model. In particular, we propose a Model Predictive Path Integral controller (MPPI), that uses the GPU-parallelizable IsaacGym simulator to compute the forward dynamics of a problem. By doing so, we eliminate the need for explicit encoding of robot dynamics and contacts with objects for MPPI. Since no explicit dynamic modeling is required, our method is easily extendable to different objects and robots and allows one to solve complex navigation and contact-rich tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in several simulated and real-world settings, among which mobile navigation with collision avoidance, non-prehensile manipulation, and whole-body control for high-dimensional configuration spaces. This method is a powerful and accessible open-source tool to solve a large variety of contact-rich motion planning tasks.
ISSN:2331-8422