Interactive Co-Design of Form and Function for Legged Robots using the Adjoint Method

TL;DR

This paper introduces an interactive design system for legged robots that jointly optimizes morphology and behavior using an adjoint method, making robot design more accessible and efficient for users.

Contribution

It presents a novel interactive optimization approach that enables real-time co-design of robot form and function, improving usability and design quality.

Findings

Successfully optimized robot designs for multiple scenarios in simulation.

Achieved user-specified behaviors starting from infeasible initial designs.

Maintained interactive design flow with efficient computation.

Abstract

Our goal is to make robotics more accessible to casual users by reducing the domain knowledge required in designing and building robots. Towards this goal, we present an interactive computational design system that enables users to design legged robots with desired morphologies and behaviors by specifying higher level descriptions. The core of our method is a design optimization technique that reasons about the structure, and motion of a robot in coupled manner in order to achieve user-specified robot behavior, and performance. We are inspired by the recent works that also aim to jointly optimize robot's form and function. However, through efficient computation of necessary design changes, our approach enables us to keep user-in-the-loop for interactive applications. We evaluate our system in simulation by automatically improving robot designs for multiple scenarios. Starting with initial user designs that are physically infeasible or inadequate to perform the user-desired task, we show optimized designs that achieve user-specifications, all while ensuring an interactive design flow.