Incorporating our differentiable contact manifold generation method to Newton

[bekeronur]

Hi!

My name is Onur Beker, I am a first-year PhD student in the Autonomous Learning Group of Prof. Georg Martius as part of the Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems in Germany.

I am a big fan of the Newton simulator and have learned a lot from studying it, thanks a lot for making everything open-source!

Our group has a new collision detection method that produces contact manifolds between non-convex surfaces in a smoothly differentiable manner, which is optimized for massive vectorization. It is described in detail in this pre-print on arxiv (which we are currently converting into a complete paper by adding robotics experiments).

We have just recently presented our method at the contact-rich robotics workshop in ICRA, where we had a chance to meet the team at NVIDIA that implemented the hydroelastic contact model (which can be found here). They were kind enough to encourage us about opening a thread on Github to discuss the possibility of incorporating our method to the Newton codebase. If the Newton team is also interested in this, we would be very happy to do so!

Our method essentially constitutes a middle ground between the mesh-sdf collision routine in Newton, and the hydroelastic-contact routine. As such, a potential implementation would look very similar to these two in terms of how it is incorporated into the codebase (i.e. as a single source file that lies under newton/_src/geometry). We believe it would also constitute a good synergy with the recent discussions about implemeting differentiable contacts as well.

Thanks a lot for your time, and please keep up the great open-source work!