Abstract: 

Differentiable Simulations have recently been demonstrated to be useful for robotic manipulation in a wide range of applications. For robotic cloth manipulation, a key feature is to maintain intersection-free properties.  We present DiffClothAI, a unified differentiable simulation framework coupling cloth and articulated rigid bodies with intersection-free friction contact. DiffClothAI integrates the Project Dynamics and Incremental Potential Contact coherently and proposes an effective method to derive gradients in the Cloth Simulation. We develop the differentiable coupling mechanism between articulated rigid bodies and cloth. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness and accuracy of our proposed differentiable Cloth Simulation and perform a variety of experiments in the downstream robotic manipulation applications.