Related papers: Co-design is powerful and not free
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
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.…
Designing multi-agent robotic systems requires reasoning across tightly coupled decisions spanning heterogeneous domains, including robot design, fleet composition, and planning. Much effort has been devoted to isolated improvements in…
Robots and intelligent systems that sense or interact with the world are increasingly being used to automate a wide array of tasks. The ability of these systems to complete these tasks depends on a large range of technologies such as the…
Co-designing autonomous robotic agents involves simultaneously optimizing the controller and physical design of the agent. Its inherent bi-level optimization formulation necessitates an outer loop design optimization driven by an inner loop…
The collective operation of robots, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating as a team or swarm, is affected by their individual capabilities, which in turn is dependent on their physical design, aka morphology. However, with the…
Designing cyber-physical systems is a complex task which requires insights at multiple abstraction levels. The choices of single components are deeply interconnected and need to be jointly studied. In this work, we consider the problem of…
Designing robots by hand can be costly and time consuming, especially if the robots have to be created with novel materials, or be robust to internal or external changes. In order to create robots automatically, without the need for human…
Brain-body co-optimization remains a challenging problem, despite increasing interest from the community in recent years. To understand and overcome the challenges, we propose exhaustively mapping a morphology-fitness landscape to study it.…
We consider the problem of co-designing embodied intelligence as a whole in a structured way, from hardware components such as propulsion systems and sensors to software modules such as control and perception pipelines. We propose a…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
When limited by their own morphologies, humans and some species of animals have the remarkable ability to use objects from the environment toward accomplishing otherwise impossible tasks. Robots might similarly unlock a range of additional…
Interesting and efficient collective behavior observed in multi-robot or swarm systems emerges from the individual behavior of the robots. The functional space of individual robot behaviors is in turn shaped or constrained by the robot's…
Despite rapid evolution, embedded computing systems increasingly feature resource constraints and workload uncertainties. To achieve much better system performance in unpredictable environments than traditional design approaches, a novel…
The co-adaptation of robot morphology and behaviour becomes increasingly important with the advent of fast 3D-manufacturing methods and efficient deep reinforcement learning algorithms. A major challenge for the application of co-adaptation…
Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and…
The collective performance or capacity of collaborative autonomous systems such as a swarm of robots is jointly influenced by the morphology and the behavior of individual systems in that collective. In that context, this paper explores how…
Humanoid robots represent a central frontier in embodied intelligence, as their anthropomorphic form enables natural deployment in humans' workspace. Brain-body co-design for humanoids presents a promising approach to realizing this…
Recent advances in 3D printing and manufacturing of miniaturized robotic hardware and computing are paving the way to build inexpensive and disposable robots. This will have a large impact on several applications including scientific…
As robots become more prevalent, optimizing their design for better performance and efficiency is becoming increasingly important. However, current robot design practices overlook the impact of perception and design choices on a robot's…