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Added velocity damping to pusher, fixes #477

Open AwesomeLemon opened this issue 1 year ago • 0 comments

As described in https://github.com/google/brax/issues/477, currently there is no friction-like force in the pusher environment with the spring backend. This means that even a slight touch of the object by the robot leads to the object infinitely sliding off into the distance.

Per suggestion of @btaba in that issue, I added velocity damping, which solved the problem.

Note that I had to set its value to -1, despite it being set to either 0 or 1 in the Brax codebase. Looking at the integrator.py code shows that having vel_damping > 0 leads to anti-damping, as xd_i.vel is multiplied by exp(positive number) > 1.

AwesomeLemon avatar Jul 19 '24 10:07 AwesomeLemon