Embodied Co-Design for Rapidly Evolving Agents: Taxonomy, Frontiers, and Challenges

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent advances in embodied co-design (ECD), a paradigm inspired by biological brain-body co-evolution, for creating adaptable and robust intelligent agents through joint optimization of morphology and control.

Contribution

It formalizes the concept of ECD, introduces a hierarchical taxonomy, and synthesizes insights from over a hundred recent studies on ECD frameworks, benchmarks, and applications.

Findings

Hierarchical taxonomy of ECD frameworks established

Comprehensive review of benchmarks and datasets in ECD

Identification of key challenges and future directions

Abstract

Brain-body co-evolution enables animals to develop complex behaviors in their environments. Inspired by this biological synergy, embodied co-design (ECD) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for creating intelligent agents-from virtual creatures to physical robots-by jointly optimizing their morphologies and controllers rather than treating control in isolation. This integrated approach facilitates richer environmental interactions and robust task performance. In this survey, we provide a systematic overview of recent advances in ECD. We first formalize the concept of ECD and position it within related fields. We then introduce a hierarchical taxonomy: a lower layer that breaks down agent design into three fundamental components-controlling brain, body morphology, and task environment-and an upper layer that integrates these components into four major ECD frameworks: bi-level, single-level, generative, and open-ended. This taxonomy allows us to synthesize insights from more than one hundred recent studies. We further review notable benchmarks, datasets, and applications in both simulated and real-world scenarios. Finally, we identify significant challenges and offer insights into promising future research directions. A project associated with this survey has been created at https://github.com/Yuxing-Wang-THU/SurveyBrainBody.