Gensis for Micromanipulation

[ale-amic1]

Dear all,

Thank you very much for making Genesis, it seems very promising.

I am a PhD student at Aalto University, Finland, and we are considering trying Genesis for robot-learning in the context of micromanipulation tasks.

E.g. I need to define grippers that can hold very small objects, e.g. one hair with a diameter of 0.1-0.5 millimeters.

At microscale, there are a lot of adhesion forces that interfere with manipulation (which can usually be ignored at macro scale manipulation)

I have a few questions/topics to discuss

1. Are those forces modeled in Genesis (I could not find it myself)? Should they be added

2. The forces and displacements are going to be very small, is the floating point numerical precision going to be a problem? As an idea, is it possible to change the distance unit from meters to millimeters?

3. In our real setup we use piezo actuators, e.g. piezo stacks, piezo stick-slip sliders. Gravity is not really relevant for those, can gravity be disabled for just some bodies? I would like to reduce useless computation, and also I noticed some error while using a z joint and actuator (maybe I should just tune my kp-kv better, but I would like to remove the z error which does not happen in the real setup)

4. Do you think we have a chance of using Genesis for micromanipulation? Any adaptations I should consider?

Thank you to everyone willing to continue this discussion!

BR,
Alessandro