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.
Vision-based tactile sensors require high-fidelity simulation for reinforcement learning, yet existing approaches struggle to provide accurate mechanical stress fields within GPU-accelerated robotics platforms. We present TaCauchy, an extensible Finite Element Method (FEM) framework that integrates rigorous physics-based force computation into Isaac Sim. Built on the Unified Incremental Potential Contact (UIPC) solver, TaCauchy directly computes Cauchy stress tensors from hyperelastic constitutive laws and projects them onto contact surfaces to obtain traction forces and pressure distributions, providing mechanical ground truth from first principles rather than empirical estimation. Our framework features automatic mesh generation with geometry-aware adaptive refinement and a modular sensor interface enabling rapid integration of diverse sensors (GelSight Mini, DIGIT, 9DTact) with minimal configuration. Performance benchmarks demonstrate 33.40 FPS for single environments and 555 FPS aggregate throughput across 60 parallel environments, with stress extraction overhead under 1 ms. Physical validation experiments show strong agreement between simulated and real tactile responses across force ranges from 1.2556 N to 4.7332 N, achieving SSIM above 0.93, confirming the framework's capability to provide accurate, physically-grounded force supervision for downstream robotic manipulation tasks.
Sampling-based Model Predictive Control (SMPC) is a promising strategy for contact-rich robotic manipulation, combining gradient-free optimization with massively parallel GPU simulation. Yet, most prior work relies on simplified dynamics or remains confined to simulation. We present an MPC framework that leverages JAX for large-scale parallelization and efficient computation, coupled with the high-fidelity MuJoCo MJX simulator, and deploy it on a Franka Research 3 executing the Push-T manipulation task through a complete real-to-sim-to-real pipeline. The MTP variant with structured global sampling outperforms unimodal baselines such as CEM, MPPI, and PS across tasks that require mode switching, both in simulation and on hardware. Furthermore, we evaluate online domain randomization within the MPC sample budget, showing that contact-initiation parameters yield interpretable adaptation signals, whereas global physics parameters provide feedback that is too weak for reliable exploitation at typical replanning frequencies. These findings highlight key challenges for sampling-based MPC in contact-rich manipulation-contact sensitivity, tight compute budgets, and the difficulty of obtaining informative domain-randomization signals in real time.
Simulation frameworks such as Isaac Sim have enabled scalable robot learning for locomotion and rigid-body manipulation; however, contact-rich simulation remains a major bottleneck for deformable object manipulation. The continuously changing geometry of soft materials, together with large numbers of vertices and contact constraints, makes it difficult to achieve high accuracy, speed, and stability required for large-scale interactive learning. We present FLASH, a GPU-native simulation framework for contact-rich deformable manipulation, built on an accurate NCP-based solver that enforces strict contact and deformation constraints while being explicitly designed for fine-grained GPU parallelism. Rather than porting conventional single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) solvers to GPUs, FLASH redesigns the physics engine from the ground up to leverage modern GPU architectures, including optimized collision handling and memory layouts. As a result, FLASH scales to over 3 million degrees of freedom at 30 FPS on a single RTX 5090, while accurately simulating physical interactions. Policies trained solely on FLASH-generated synthetic data in minutes achieve robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, which we validate on physical robots performing challenging deformable manipulation tasks such as towel folding and garment folding, without any real-world demonstration, providing a practical alternative to labor-intensive real-world data collection.