DiffAqua: A Differentiable Computational Design Pipeline for Soft Underwater Swimmers with Shape Interpolation

Understand

The computational design of soft underwater swimmers is challenging because of the high degrees of freedom in soft-body modeling.

• In this paper, we present a differentiable pipeline for co-designing a soft swimmer's geometry and controller.
• Our pipeline unlocks gradient-based algorithms for discovering novel swimmer designs more efficiently than traditional gradient-free solutions.
• We propose Wasserstein barycenters as a basis for the geometric design of soft underwater swimmers since it is differentiable and can naturally interpolate between bio-inspired base shapes via optimal transport.