{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/contactnets-learning-of-discontinuous-contact","title":"ContactNets: Learning Discontinuous Contact Dynamics with Smooth, Implicit Representations","arxiv_id":"2009.11193","date":"2020-09-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Samuel Pfrommer","Mathew Halm","Michael Posa"],"abstract":"Common methods for learning robot dynamics assume motion is continuous, causing unrealistic model predictions for systems undergoing discontinuous impact and stiction behavior. In this work, we resolve this conflict with a smooth, implicit encoding of the structure inherent to contact-induced discontinuities. Our method, ContactNets, learns parameterizations of inter-body signed distance and contact-frame Jacobians, a representation that is compatible with many simulation, control, and planning environments for robotics. We furthermore circumvent the need to differentiate through stiff or non-smooth dynamics with a novel loss function inspired by the principles of complementarity and maximum dissipation. Our method can predict realistic impact, non-penetration, and stiction when trained on 60 seconds of real-world data.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11193v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.11193v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"contactnets-learning-of-discontinuous-contact","repo_url":"https://github.com/DAIRLab/contact-nets","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"BSD-3-Clause"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2009.11193","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}