Rapid Co-design of Task-Specialized Whegged Robots for Ad-Hoc Needs

TL;DR

This paper presents a co-design approach for rapidly customizing whegged robots for specific, time-sensitive tasks in various terrains, emphasizing efficient design iteration and effective sim-to-real transfer.

Contribution

It introduces a co-design method that optimizes robot morphology and trajectories for ad-hoc tasks, producing 3D printable structures and demonstrating successful real-world deployment.

Findings

Robots optimized in simulation perform nearly twice as efficiently as standard designs.

The co-designed robots exhibit strong sim-to-real transfer across terrains.

The method enables rapid customization for specific tasks in the field.

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the use of co-design methods to iterate upon robot designs in the field, performing time sensitive, ad-hoc tasks. Our method optimizes the morphology and wheg trajectory for a MiniRHex robot, producing 3D printable structures and leg trajectory parameters. Tested in four terrains, we show that robots optimized in simulation exhibit strong sim-to-real transfer and are nearly twice as efficient as the nominal platform when tested in hardware.