Interactive Co-Design of Form and Function for Legged Robots using the Adjoint Method
This work addresses the challenge of reducing domain knowledge for casual users in robot design, though it is incremental as it builds on prior joint optimization methods.
The authors tackled the problem of making robotics more accessible by developing an interactive computational design system that allows users to design legged robots with desired morphologies and behaviors through higher-level specifications, resulting in optimized designs that achieve user-specified tasks from initially infeasible or inadequate starting points in simulation.
Our goal is to make robotics more accessible to casual users by reducing the domain knowledge required in designing and building robots. Towards this goal, we present an interactive computational design system that enables users to design legged robots with desired morphologies and behaviors by specifying higher level descriptions. The core of our method is a design optimization technique that reasons about the structure, and motion of a robot in coupled manner in order to achieve user-specified robot behavior, and performance. We are inspired by the recent works that also aim to jointly optimize robot's form and function. However, through efficient computation of necessary design changes, our approach enables us to keep user-in-the-loop for interactive applications. We evaluate our system in simulation by automatically improving robot designs for multiple scenarios. Starting with initial user designs that are physically infeasible or inadequate to perform the user-desired task, we show optimized designs that achieve user-specifications, all while ensuring an interactive design flow.