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Barrier potentials gained popularity as a means for robust contact handling in physical modeling and for modeling self-avoiding shapes. The key to the success of these approaches is adherence to geometric constraints, i.e., avoiding intersections, which are the cause of most robustness problems in complex deformation simulation with contact. However, existing barrier-potential methods may lead to spurious forces and imperfect satisfaction of the geometric constraints. They may have strong resolution dependence, requiring careful adaptation of the potential parameters to the object discretizations. We present a systematic derivation of a continuum potential defined for smooth and piecewise smooth surfaces, starting from identifying a set of natural requirements for contact potentials, including the barrier property, locality, differentiable dependence on shape, and absence of forces in rest configurations. Our potential is formulated independently of surface discretization and addresses the shortcomings of existing potential-based methods while retaining their advantages. We present a discretization of our potential that is a drop-in replacement for the potential used in the incremental potential contact formulation [Li et al. 2020], and compare its behavior to other potential formulations, demonstrating that it has the expected behavior. The presented formulation connects existing barrier approaches, as all recent existing methods can be viewed as a variation of the presented potential, and lays a foundation for developing alternative (e.g., higher-order) versions. 

We introduce a general differentiable solver for time-dependent deformation problems with contact and friction. Our approach uses a finite element discretization with a high-order time integrator coupled with the recently proposed incremental potential contact method for handling contact and friction forces to solve ODE- and PDE-constrained optimization problems on scenes with complex geometry. It supports static and dynamic problems and differentiation with respect to all physical parameters involved in the physical problem description, which include shape, material parameters, friction parameters, and initial conditions. Our analytically derived adjoint formulation is efficient, with a small overhead (typically less than 10% for nonlinear problems) over the forward simulation, and shares many similarities with the forward problem, allowing the reuse of large parts of existing forward simulator code. We implement our approach on top of the open-source PolyFEM library and demonstrate the applicability of our solver to shape design, initial condition optimization, and material estimation on both simulated results and physical validations. 

We propose In-Timestep Remeshing, a fully coupled, adaptive meshing algorithm for contacting elastodynamics where remeshing steps are tightly integrated, implicitly, within the timestep solve. Our algorithm refines and coarsens the domain automatically by measuring physical energy changes within each ongoing timestep solve. This provides consistent, degree-of-freedom-efficient, productive remeshing that, by construction, is physics-aware and so avoids the errors, over-refinements, artifacts, per-example hand-tuning, and instabilities commonly encountered when remeshing with timestepping methods. Our in-timestep computation then ensures that each simulation step's output is both a converged stable solution on the updated mesh and a temporally consistent trajectory with respect to the model and solution of the last timestep. At the same time, the output is guaranteed safe (intersection- and inversion-free) across all operations. We demonstrate applications across a wide range of extreme stress tests with challenging contacts, sharp geometries, extreme compressions, large timesteps, and wide material stiffness ranges - all scenarios well-appreciated to challenge existing remeshing methods. 

Interval computation is widely used in Computer Aided Design to certify computations that use floating point operations to avoid pitfalls related to rounding error introduced by inaccurate operations. Despite its popularity and practical benefits, support for interval arithmetic is not standardized nor available in mainstream programming languages. We propose the first benchmark for interval computations, coupled with reference solutions computed with exact arithmetic, and compare popular C and C++ libraries over different architectures, operating systems, and compilers. The benchmark allows identifying limitations in existing implementations, and provides a reliable guide on which library to use on each system for different CAD applications. We believe that our benchmark will be useful for developers of future interval libraries, as a way to test the correctness and performance of their algorithms.