IsaacIPC: Coupling High-Fidelity Simulation and Realistic Rendering for Contact-Rich Robotic Systems
This work addresses the need for realistic simulation and rendering in contact-rich robotic tasks, but the improvements are incremental over existing IPC and simulation frameworks.
IsaacIPC couples high-fidelity simulation with realistic rendering for contact-rich robotic systems, introducing the geometric mortar contact potential (GMCP) for improved tactile sensing. It enables real-time rendering and is demonstrated on various robotic simulations.
We present IsaacIPC, a robotic simulation framework that couples GPU accelerated incremental potential contact (IPC) with IsaacSim/Lab. IsaacIPC maps simulated deformation between simulation and visual meshes, enabling real-time realistic rendering with applications to data collection and policy evaluation. For tactile sensing, we introduce the geometric mortar contact potential (GMCP), which defines a barrier potential over contact samples on tactile surfaces to better resolve contact-pressure distributions. We evaluate GMCP on contact benchmarks and demonstrate IsaacIPC on rigid-deformable robotic simulations including a quadruped robot, a dexterous hand, and a universal manipulation interface (UMI) gripper.