Tao Du
About Me
I am a final-year Ph.D. student at MIT CSAIL advised by Wojciech Matusik. My research lies at the intersection of computer graphics, robotics, and machine learning. I develop computational methods to solve challenging design and control problems in complex physical systems. Some of my research topics include building differentiable physics simulation environments for inverse design and control of robots, developing end-to-end pipelines for co-optimizing shape and control of real robots, and exploring continuous Pareto fronts in multi-objective optimization and multi-task learning.
Research Interests
Graphics: computational design and fabrication, (differentiable) physics simulation, shape analysis
Robotics: aerial robots, soft robots
Learning: differentiable physics, multi-task learning, sim-to-real transfer
News
04/2021: I will talk about simulation and robotics in the Computational Fabrication Seminar on April 21
[Video].
04/2021: Two papers conditionally accepted to SIGGRAPH 2021.
Publications
(* indicates equal contributions)
Fusion 360 Gallery: A Dataset and Environment for Programmatic CAD Reconstruction
Karl D.D. Willis, Yewen Pu, Jieliang Luo, Hang Chu, Tao Du, Joseph G. Lambourne, Armando Solar-Lezama, Wojciech Matusik. SIGGRAPH 2021 (ACM Transactions on Graphics)
DiffAqua: A Differentiable Computational Design Pipeline for Soft Underwater Swimmers with Shape Interpolation
Pingchuan Ma, Tao Du, John Z. Zhang, Kui Wu, Andrew Spielberg, Robert K. Katzschmann, Wojciech Matusik. SIGGRAPH 2021 (ACM Transactions on Graphics)
Underwater Soft Robot Modeling and Control with Differentiable Simulation
Tao Du*, Josie Hughes*, Sebastien Wah, Wojciech Matusik, Daniela Rus. RA-L/RoboSoft 2021
PlasticineLab: A Soft-Body Manipulation Benchmark with Differentiable Physics
Zhiao Huang, Yuanming Hu, Tao Du, Siyuan Zhou, Hao Su, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Chuang Gan. ICLR 2021 (Spotlight)
Functional Optimization of Fluidic Devices with Differentiable Stokes Flow
Tao Du, Kui Wu, Andrew Spielberg, Wojciech Matusik, Bo Zhu, Eftychios Sifakis. SIGGRAPH Asia 2020 (ACM Transactions on Graphics)
Efficient Continuous Pareto Exploration in Multi-Task Learning
Learning-in-the-Loop Optimization: End-to-End Control and Co-Design of Soft Robots through Learned Deep Latent Representations
Andrew Spielberg, Allan Zhao, Tao Du, Yuanming Hu, Daniela Rus, Wojciech Matusik. NeurIPS 2019
Learning to Fly: Computational Controller Design for Hybrid UAVs with Reinforcement Learning
Jie Xu, Tao Du, Michael Foshey, Beichen Li, Bo Zhu, Adriana Schulz, Wojciech Matusik. SIGGRAPH 2019 (ACM Transactions on Graphics)
InverseCSG: Automatic Conversion of 3D Models to CSG Trees
Tao Du, Jeevana Priya Inala, Yewen Pu, Andrew Spielberg, Adriana Schulz, Daniela Rus, Armando Solar-Lezama, Wojciech Matusik. SIGGRAPH Asia 2018 (ACM Transactions on Graphics)
Computational Multicopter Design
Tao Du, Adriana Schulz, Bo Zhu, Bernd Bickel, Wojciech Matusik. SIGGRAPH Asia 2016 (ACM Transactions on Graphics)
[Project] [Paper] [Supplement] [Code (design)] [Code (control)] [Hardware]
Convolutional Wasserstein Distances: Efficient Optimal Transportation on Geometric Domains
Justin Solomon, Fernando de Goes, Gabriel Peyré, Marco Cuturi, Adrian Butscher, Andy Nguyen, Tao Du, Leonidas Guibas. SIGGRAPH 2015 (ACM Transactions on Graphics)
Talks
Press
Miscellaneous
A Practical Guide to Building a Pentacopter
A step-by-step document that explains how to design, simulate, control, and build a pentacopter for drone hobbyists.
Age of Empires 2
My favorite video game for over 15 years. I am among the top 20-25% players (1v1 random maps) on the Internet and am working hard to become a Pareto optimal solution to {max(research), max(AoE2 ELO)} in the union set of graphics PhDs and AoE2 players across the world.