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Alejandro M. Castro

7 accepted papers

2025

A Convex Formulation of Material Points and Rigid Bodies with GPU-Accelerated Async-Coupling for Interactive Simulation

IROS 2025

We present a novel convex formulation that weakly couples the Material Point Method (MPM) with rigid body dynamics through frictional contact, optimized for efficient GPU parallelization. Our approach features an asynchronous time-splitting scheme to integrate MPM and rigid body dynamics under diffe

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2025

Embedded IPC: Fast and Intersection-Free Simulation in Reduced Subspace for Robot Manipulation

ICRA 2025

Physics-based simulation is essential for developing and evaluating robot manipulation policies, particularly in scenarios involving deformable objects and complex contact interactions. However, existing simulators often struggle to balance computational efficiency with numerical accuracy, especiall

Cited by 2SourceScholar
2025

Proximity and Visuotactile Point Cloud Fusion for Contact Patches in Extreme Deformation

ICRA 2025

Visuotactile sensors are a popular tactile sensing strategy due to high-fidelity estimates of local object geometry. However, existing algorithms for processing raw sensor inputs to useful intermediate signals such as contact patches struggle in high-deformation regimes. This is due to physical cons

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2023

A Convex Formulation of Frictional Contact Between Rigid and Deformable Bodies

RA-L 2023

We present a novel convex formulation that models rigid and deformable bodies coupled through frictional contact. The formulation incorporates a new corotational material model with positive semi-definite Hessian, which allows us to extend our previous work on the convex formulation of compliant con

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2022

Velocity Level Approximation of Pressure Field Contact Patches

RA-L 2022

Pressure Field Contact (PFC) was recently introduced as a method for detailed modeling of contact interface regions at rates much faster than elasticity-theory models, while at the same time predicting essential trends and capturing rich contact behavior. The PFC model was designed to work in conjun

Cited by 34SourceScholar
2020

A Transition-Aware Method for the Simulation of Compliant Contact With Regularized Friction

RA-L 2020

Multibody simulation with frictional contact has been a challenging subject of research for the past thirty years. Rigidbody assumptions are commonly used to approximate the physics of contact, and together with Coulomb friction, lead to challengingto-solve nonlinear complementarity problems (NCP).

Cited by 21SourceScholar
2020

Fast Model-Based Contact Patch and Pose Estimation for Highly Deformable Dense-Geometry Tactile Sensors

RA-L 2020

Modeling deformable contact is a well-known problem in soft robotics and is particularly challenging for compliant interfaces that permit large deformations. We present a model for the behavior of a highly deformable dense geometry sensor in its interaction with objects; the forward model predicts t

Cited by 42SourceScholar