A 'MAP' to find high-performing soft robot designs: Traversing complex design spaces using MAP-elites and Topology Optimization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical optimization framework combining topology optimization and MAP-elites to efficiently explore complex design spaces and generate diverse, high-performing soft robot designs, including soft grippers.

Contribution

It presents a novel hierarchical optimization method that integrates topology optimization with quality diversity algorithms to discover diverse, high-performance soft robot designs.

Findings

Enhanced grasp performance in soft grippers.

Effective exploration of complex design spaces.

Applicable to both soft and rigid parts.

Abstract

Soft robotics has emerged as the standard solution for grasping deformable objects, and has proven invaluable for mobile robotic exploration in extreme environments. However, despite this growth, there are no widely adopted computational design tools that produce quality, manufacturable designs. To advance beyond the diminishing returns of heuristic bio-inspiration, the field needs efficient tools to explore the complex, non-linear design spaces present in soft robotics, and find novel high-performing designs. In this work, we investigate a hierarchical design optimization methodology which combines the strengths of topology optimization and quality diversity optimization to generate diverse and high-performance soft robots by evolving the design domain. The method embeds variably sized void regions within the design domain and evolves their size and position, to facilitating a richer exploration of the design space and find a diverse set of high-performing soft robots. We demonstrate its efficacy on both benchmark topology optimization problems and soft robotic design problems, and show the method enhances grasp performance when applied to soft grippers. Our method provides a new framework to design parts in complex design domains, both soft and rigid.