Evolutionary Co-Design of Morphology and Control of Soft Tensegrity Modular Robots with Programmable Stiffness

TL;DR

This paper introduces a co-evolutionary approach to design soft tensegrity modular robots, emphasizing the importance of stiffness as a key parameter influencing morphology, control, and locomotion strategies.

Contribution

It presents a novel method combining morphological and control co-evolution for tensegrity robots with programmable stiffness, highlighting stiffness's role in design and behavior.

Findings

Stiffness significantly affects robot morphology and locomotion.

Co-evolution optimizes both structure and control for different stiffness levels.

Proves the importance of stiffness in tensegrity robot design.

Abstract

Tensegrity structures are lightweight, can undergo large deformations, and have outstanding robustness capabilities. These unique properties inspired roboticists to investigate their use. However, the morphological design, control, assembly, and actuation of tensegrity robots are still difficult tasks. Moreover, the stiffness of tensegrity robots is still an underestimated design parameter. In this article, we propose to use easy to assemble, actuated tensegrity modules and body-brain co-evolution to design soft tensegrity modular robots. Moreover, we prove the importance of tensegrity robots stiffness showing how the evolution suggests a different morphology, control, and locomotion strategy according to the modules stiffness.