Identifying Inductive Biases for Robot Co-Design
2026-04-13 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how to design a robot's body shape and its control system together to work better, similar to how animals' bodies and brains co-evolve. They found patterns in how design quality changes smoothly in certain parts of the design space and that better designs connect body and control more closely. Using these findings, they created an algorithm that learns and adapts to each task's unique design challenges, making it faster and more effective than existing methods. Their approach led to a 36% better performance and used way fewer trials to find good designs.
robot morphologycontrol systemsco-designinductive biaseslow-dimensional manifoldsoft roboticslocomotionmanipulation taskssample efficiencydesign optimization
Authors
Apoorv Vaish, Oliver Brock
Abstract
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 method for identifying inductive biases tailored to its structure. In this paper, we analyze co-design landscapes for soft locomotion and manipulation tasks and identify three patterns that are consistent across regions of their co-design spaces. We observe that within regions of co-design space, quality varies along a low-dimensional manifold. Higher-quality regions exhibit variations spread across more dimensions, while tightly coupling morphology and control. We leverage these insights to devise an efficient co-design algorithm. Since the precise instantiation of this structure varies across tasks and is not known a priori, our algorithm infers it from information gathered during search and adapts to each task's specific structure. This yields $36\%$ more improvement than benchmark algorithms. Moreover, our algorithm achieved more than two orders of magnitude in sample efficiency compared to these benchmark algorithms, demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging inductive biases to co-design.