Related papers: Efficient and Diverse Generative Robot Designs usi…
Evolutionary Robotics offers the possibility to design robots to solve a specific task automatically by optimizing their morphology and control together. However, this co-optimization of body and control is challenging, because controllers…
In evolutionary robotics, jointly optimising the design and the controller of robots is a challenging task due to the huge complexity of the solution space formed by the possible combinations of body and controller. We focus on the…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
Morpho-evolution (ME) refers to the simultaneous optimisation of a robot's design and controller to maximise performance given a task and environment. Many genetic encodings have been proposed which are capable of representing design and…
Natural lifeforms specialise to their environmental niches across many levels; from low-level features such as DNA and proteins, through to higher-level artefacts including eyes, limbs, and overarching body plans. We propose Multi-Level…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from three core difficulties: temporal credit assignment with sparse rewards, lack…
Evolutionary Computation (EC) has emerged as a powerful field of Artificial Intelligence, inspired by nature's mechanisms of gradual development. However, EC approaches often face challenges such as stagnation, diversity loss, computational…
Engineering design optimization requires an efficient combination of a 3D shape representation, an optimization algorithm, and a design performance evaluation method, which is often computationally expensive. We present a prompt evolution…
Robots' behavior and performance are determined both by hardware and software. The design process of robotic systems is a complex journey that involves multiple phases. Throughout this process, the aim is to tackle various criteria…
In this paper, we introduce a model of evolution and learning in robots that co-optimizes a distribution of latent design vectors (genotypes) and a mixture of control experts (neural modules), which are gated by the latent coordinates of…
Designing optimal soft modular robots is difficult, due to non-trivial interactions between morphology and controller. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs), combined with physical simulators, represent a valid tool to overcome this issue. In this…
Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…
In collective robotic systems, the automatic generation of controllers for complex tasks is still a challenging problem. Open-ended evolution of complex robot behaviors can be a possible solution whereby an intrinsic driver for pattern…
Applications of large-scale mobile multi-robot systems can be beneficial over monolithic robots because of higher potential for robustness and scalability. Developing controllers for multi-robot systems is challenging because the multitude…
Compared with traditional design methods, generative design significantly attracts engineers in various disciplines. In thiswork, howto achieve the real-time generative design of optimized structures with various diversities and…
Designing controllers for robot swarms is challenging, because human developers have typically no good understanding of the link between the details of a controller that governs individual robots and the swarm behavior that is an indirect…
Coordination behavior in robot swarms is inherently multi-modal in nature. That is, there are numerous ways in which a swarm of robots can avoid inter-agent collisions and reach their respective goals. However, the problem of generating…
Industrial robots are designed as general-purpose hardware with limited ability to adapt to changing task requirements or environments. Modular robots, on the other hand, offer flexibility and can be easily customized to suit diverse needs.…
The integration of large language models (LLMs) into robotic systems has accelerated progress in embodied artificial intelligence, yet current approaches remain constrained by existing robotic architectures, particularly serial mechanisms.…
Despite the recent successes in robotic locomotion control, the design of robot relies heavily on human engineering. Automatic robot design has been a long studied subject, but the recent progress has been slowed due to the large…