Identifying Inductive Biases for Robot Co-Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a systematic method to identify inductive biases in robot co-design, enabling more efficient search for optimal morphology and control configurations.

Contribution

The paper presents an adaptive algorithm that infers task-specific inductive biases during search, improving co-design efficiency and effectiveness over benchmarks.

Findings

Achieved 36% more improvement than benchmark algorithms.

More than two orders of magnitude in sample efficiency.

Identified consistent low-dimensional structures in co-design landscapes.

Abstract

Co-designing a robot's morphology and control can ensure synergistic interactions between them, prevalent in biological organisms. However, co-design is a high-dimensional search problem. To make this search tractable, we need a systematic method for identifying inductive biases tailored to its structure. In this paper, we analyze co-design landscapes for soft locomotion and manipulation tasks and identify three patterns that are consistent across regions of their co-design spaces. We observe that within regions of co-design space, quality varies along a low-dimensional manifold. Higher-quality regions exhibit variations spread across more dimensions, while tightly coupling morphology and control. We leverage these insights to devise an efficient co-design algorithm. Since the precise instantiation of this structure varies across tasks and is not known a priori, our algorithm infers it from information gathered during search and adapts to each task's specific structure. This yields $36\%$ more improvement than benchmark algorithms. Moreover, our algorithm achieved more than two orders of magnitude in sample efficiency compared to these benchmark algorithms, demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging inductive biases to co-design.