Related papers: Evolutionary Brain-Body Co-Optimization Consistent…
Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes…
Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed design. The…
Robotic performance emerges from the coupling of body and controller, yet it remains unclear when morphology-control co-design is necessary. We present a unified framework that embeds morphology and control parameters within a single neural…
Co-designing a robot's morphology and control can ensure synergistic interactions between them, prevalent in biological organisms. However, co-design is a high-dimensional search problem. To make this search tractable, we need a systematic…
Embodiment co-design aims to optimize a robot's morphology and control policy simultaneously. While prior work has demonstrated its potential for generating environment-adaptive robots, this field still faces persistent challenges in…
Evolving morphologies and controllers of robots simultaneously leads to a problem: Even if the parents have well-matching bodies and brains, the stochastic recombination can break this match and cause a body-brain mismatch in their…
Morphology-control co-design concerns the coupled optimization of an agent's body structure and control policy. This problem exhibits a bi-level structure, where the control dynamically adapts to the morphology to maximize performance.…
A significant challenge in nature-inspired algorithmics is the identification of specific characteristics of problems that make them harder (or easier) to solve using specific methods. The hope is that, by identifying these characteristics,…
Optimization for deep networks is currently a very active area of research. As neural networks become deeper, the ability in manually optimizing the network becomes harder. Mini-batch normalization, identification of effective respective…
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…
Both the design and control of a robot play equally important roles in its task performance. However, while optimal control is well studied in the machine learning and robotics community, less attention is placed on finding the optimal…
Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily on optimizing…
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…
Evolutionary and bioinspired computation are crucial for efficiently addressing complex optimization problems across diverse application domains. By mimicking processes observed in nature, like evolution itself, these algorithms offer…
Evolutionary search is well suited for large-scale biophysical brain modeling, where many parameters with nonlinear interactions and no tractable gradients need to be optimized. Standard evolutionary approaches achieve an excellent fit to…
Artificial and biological systems may evolve similar computational solutions despite fundamental differences in architecture and learning mechanisms -- a form of convergent evolution. We demonstrate this phenomenon through large-scale…
The joint optimisation of body-plan and control via evolutionary processes can be challenging in rich morphological spaces in which offspring can have body-plans that are very different from either of their parents. This causes a potential…
A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the…
The co-design of robot morphology and neural control typically requires using reinforcement learning to approximate a unique control policy gradient for each body plan, demanding massive amounts of training data to measure the performance…
Optimizing the body and brain of a robot is a coupled challenge: the morphology determines what control strategies are effective, while the control parameters influence how well the morphology performs. This joint optimization can be done…