Researcher profile

Zherong Pan

Zherong Pan contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

8 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

WorldParticle: Unified Simulation of Lagrangian Particle Dynamics via Transformer

A unified simulator that can model diverse physical phenomena without solver-specific redesign is a long-standing goal across simulation science. We present a learning-based particle simulator built on a single transformer architecture to model cloth, elastic solds, Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids, granular materials, and molecular dynamics. Our model follows a prediction-correction design on a shared Lagrangian particle representation. An explicit predictor first advances particles under the known external forces, producing an intermediate state that captures externally driven motion but not inter-particle interactions. A learned corrector then predicts the residual position and velocity updates through three stages: a particle tokenizer that encodes local particle-particle, particle-boundary, and topology-guided interactions; a super-token encoder that hierarchically merges particle tokens into a compact set of super tokens via alternating self-attention and token merging; and a super-token decoder that lifts these super tokens back to particle resolution through cross-attention to predict per-particle position and velocity corrections. Progressive token merging reduces the attention cost at successive encoder layers by halving the token count at each level, and the decoder communicates through the compact super-token set rather than full particle-to-particle attention. Across the six dynamics categories, the same architecture generalizes to unseen materials, boundary configurations, initial conditions, and external forces. We further demonstrate downstream interactive control, inverse design, and learning from real-world manipulation data, reducing the need for per-phenomenon solver engineering.

preprint2022arXiv

First-Order Bilevel Topology Optimization for Fast Mechanical Design

Topology Optimization (TO), which maximizes structural robustness under material weight constraints, is becoming an essential step for the automatic design of mechanical parts. However, existing TO algorithms use the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) that requires massive computational resources. We present a novel TO algorithm that incurs a much lower iterative cost. Unlike conventional methods that require exact inversions of large FEA system matrices at every iteration, we reformulate the problem as a bilevel optimization that can be solved using a first-order algorithm and only inverts the system matrix approximately. As a result, our method incurs a low iterative cost, and users can preview the TO results interactively for fast design updates. Theoretical convergence analysis and numerical experiments are conducted to verify our effectiveness. We further discuss extensions to use high-performance preconditioners and fine-grained parallelism on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

preprint2022arXiv

Joint Search of Optimal Topology and Trajectory for Planar Linkages

We present an algorithm to compute planar linkage topology and geometry, given a user-specified end-effector trajectory. Planar linkage structures convert rotational or prismatic motions of a single actuator into an arbitrarily complex periodic motion, \refined{which is an important component when building low-cost, modular robots, mechanical toys, and foldable structures in our daily lives (chairs, bikes, and shelves). The design of such structures require trial and error even for experienced engineers. Our research provides semi-automatic methods for exploring novel designs given high-level specifications and constraints.} We formulate this problem as a non-smooth numerical optimization with quadratic objective functions and non-convex quadratic constraints involving mixed-integer decision variables (MIQCQP). We propose and compare three approximate algorithms to solve this problem: mixed-integer conic-programming (MICP), mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP), and simulated annealing (SA). We evaluated these algorithms searching for planar linkages involving $10-14$ rigid links. Our results show that the best performance can be achieved by combining MICP and MINLP, leading to a hybrid algorithm capable of finding the planar linkages within a couple of hours on a desktop machine, which significantly outperforms the SA baseline in terms of optimality. We highlight the effectiveness of our optimized planar linkages by using them as legs of a walking robot.

preprint2022arXiv

Multi-Robot Path Planning Using Medial-Axis-Based Pebble-Graph Embedding

We present a centralized algorithm for labeled, disk-shaped Multi-Robot Path Planning (MPP) in a continuous planar workspace with polygonal boundaries. Our method automatically transform the continuous problem into a discrete, graph-based variant termed the pebble motion problem, which can be solved efficiently. To construct the underlying pebble graph, we identify inscribed circles in the workspace via a medial axis transform and organize robots into layers within each inscribed circle. We show that our layered pebble-graph enables collision-free motions, allowing all graph-restricted MPP instances to be feasible. MPP instances with continuous start and goal positions can then be solved via local navigations that route robots from and to graph vertices. We tested our method on several environments with high robot-packing densities (up to $61.6\%$ of the workspace). For environments with narrow passages, such density violates the well-separated assumptions made by state-of-the-art MPP planners, while our method achieves an average success rate of $83\%$.

preprint2022arXiv

New Formulation of Mixed-Integer Conic Programming for Globally Optimal Grasp Planning

We present a two-level branch-and-bound (BB) algorithm to compute the optimal gripper pose that maximizes a grasp metric in a restricted search space. Our method can take the gripper's kinematics feasibility into consideration to ensure that a given gripper can reach the set of grasp points without collisions or predict infeasibility with finite-time termination when no pose exists for a given set of grasp points. Our main technical contribution is a novel mixed-integer conic programming (MICP) formulation for the inverse kinematics of the gripper that uses a small number of binary variables and tightened constraints, which can be efficiently solved via a low-level BB algorithm. Our experiments show that optimal gripper poses for various target objects can be computed taking 20-180 minutes of computation on a desktop machine and the computed grasp quality, in terms of the Q1 metric, is better than those generated using sampling-based planners.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Differentiable Grasp Planner for High-DOF Grippers

We present an end-to-end algorithm for training deep neural networks to grasp novel objects. Our algorithm builds all the essential components of a grasping system using a forward-backward automatic differentiation approach, including the forward kinematics of the gripper, the collision between the gripper and the target object, and the metric for grasp poses. In particular, we show that a generalized Q1 grasp metric is defined and differentiable for inexact grasps generated by a neural network, and the derivatives of our generalized Q1 metric can be computed from a sensitivity analysis of the induced optimization problem. We show that the derivatives of the (self-)collision terms can be efficiently computed from a watertight triangle mesh of low-quality. Altogether, our algorithm allows for the computation of grasp poses for high-DOF grippers in an unsupervised mode with no ground truth data, or it improves the results in a supervised mode using a small dataset. Our new learning algorithm significantly simplifies the data preparation for learning-based grasping systems and leads to higher qualities of learned grasps on common 3D shape datasets [7, 49, 26, 25], achieving a 22% higher success rate on physical hardware and a 0.12 higher value on the Q1 grasp quality metric.

preprint2020arXiv

Generating Grasp Poses for a High-DOF Gripper Using Neural Networks

We present a learning-based method for representing grasp poses of a high-DOF hand using neural networks. Due to redundancy in such high-DOF grippers, there exists a large number of equally effective grasp poses for a given target object, making it difficult for the neural network to find consistent grasp poses. We resolve this ambiguity by generating an augmented dataset that covers many possible grasps for each target object and train our neural networks using a consistency loss function to identify a one-to-one mapping from objects to grasp poses. We further enhance the quality of neural-network-predicted grasp poses using a collision loss function to avoid penetrations. We use an object dataset that combines the BigBIRD Database, the KIT Database, the YCB Database, and the Grasp Dataset to show that our method can generate high-DOF grasp poses with higher accuracy than supervised learning baselines. The quality of the grasp poses is on par with the groundtruth poses in the dataset. In addition, our method is robust and can handle noisy object models such as those constructed from multi-view depth images, allowing our method to be implemented on a 25-DOF Shadow Hand hardware platform.

preprint2020arXiv

Realtime Simulation of Thin-Shell Deformable Materials using CNN-Based Mesh Embedding

We address the problem of accelerating thin-shell deformable object simulations by dimension reduction. We present a new algorithm to embed a high-dimensional configuration space of deformable objects in a low-dimensional feature space, where the configurations of objects and feature points have approximate one-to-one mapping. Our key technique is a graph-based convolutional neural network (CNN) defined on meshes with arbitrary topologies and a new mesh embedding approach based on physics-inspired loss term. We have applied our approach to accelerate high-resolution thin shell simulations corresponding to cloth-like materials, where the configuration space has tens of thousands of degrees of freedom. We show that our physics-inspired embedding approach leads to higher accuracy compared with prior mesh embedding methods. Finally, we show that the temporal evolution of the mesh in the feature space can also be learned using a recurrent neural network (RNN) leading to fully learnable physics simulators. After training our learned simulator runs $500-10000\times$ faster and the accuracy is high enough for robot manipulation tasks.